"Moreover, delivering reliability as good as existing BlackBerry smartphones would be especially impressive."

Bah. Their recent smartphones have been decidedly unreliable, if my company's experience is any indication. The phones with the trackball were horrible, dying long before their 24 month contracts were up. Many stopped charging without some physical assistance at first, which later evolved to not charging at all. We'd have folks running around with a second BlackBerry device--one that had stopped working for other reasons, but would still charge a battery--just for the purposes of charging... at least until they could order a new device without paying an early termination charge. We also had significant numbers that would just start acting flaky after about 12-18 months and would have to be replaced. They may have made quality gear way back when, but not in the past 6-7 years.

In contrast, aside from some broken screens, we haven't had nearly as much trouble with either our iPhones our Windows Phones.

It's too bad, though, that they couldn't get QNX out the door much earlier. They could have made a much better recovery if they pushed their business and security strengths--something iPhone failed at miserably, and Android was worse still. With all the MDM options that have filled in some of those gaps, though, I think they missed that chance. Microsoft had the same opportunity while RIM struggled with QNX, but blew it--instead of flanking Google and Apple and hitting them where they are weak (business use--with their business penetration, they could walked right through the back door into a hug at the time), they stormed Apple and Google's consumer space fortress. Why they disregarded the business customer in favor of the consumer, I have no idea. Who gave them the impression that they couldn't go after both? Maybe BlackBerry will be smarter.