Tags: blackberry 10, Chips, delay

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Research in Motion (RIM), the makers behind the popular Blackberry devices, have today announced the delay to the launch of its new Blackberry 10.

Blackberry  reported the net income of  £171m for the quarter to 26 November, down from £413m  in the same period of 2010. As a result, Research in Motion shares have fallen more than 6% in after-hours trading.

The Blackberry 10 phones were due to be released to the public in around February 2012, but Research in Motion now says they wont be available for sell until much later. The cause of the problem was the advanced chips for the phones not being available until the middle of the year thus halting all production as well as any Research and Development. Research in Motion has also taken a charge of $356m for unsold PlayBook tablets, which were launched with much hype earlier this year.

“They’re expecting a pretty steep decline into the holiday period, and that’s not a good sign, obviously,” said Shaw Wu, analyst at Sterne Agee.

The Blackberry 10 will operate the QNX operating system, which is seen as crucial to the company if it is to be in competition to Android devices or even the iPhone. Blackberry has recently been having a difficult few months, with a service outage knocking $40m off its net income.

“As part of our commitment to improving our performance to better meet the expectations of shareholders and customers, we continue to evaluate ways to improve in several areas of the company’s operations,” RIM’s joint chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said in a statement.

“It may take some time to realise the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking, but we continue to believe that RIM has the right set of strengths and capabilities to maintain a leading role in the mobile communications industry.”