BlackBerry Plans Four Devices This Year, Including the $275, Five-Inch Leap

BlackBerry on Tuesday showed off the BlackBerry Leap, a new five-inch, all-touch smartphone that will sell for $275 unlocked when it comes out this spring.

Ina Fried

“We’re going after the young ‘career builder,'” BlackBerry’s Ron Louks said at a press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The company plans to introduce three other devices this year, Louks said, including a new keyboard-based model and another that is a curved-screen device with a slide-out physical keyboard. Asked when that model would come out, CEO John Chen said “as soon as it’s done,” adding that it would be sometime later this year.

Asked why the company is introducing an all-touch device when it has talked up the importance of keyboards, Chen said that keyboards remain its focus. As for all-touch models, Chen said: “We will build some, but it will be a few.”

Earlier at the event, Chen forecast that last quarter’s finish in the black will become a trend, with the company continuing to post profits and generate cash as revenue starts to stabilize.

Chen used a similar event at last year’s Mobile World Congress to show a glimpse of the Z3 and talk about what became of the BlackBerry Classic.

Asked how the Classic and Passport were selling, Chen declined to comment, saying the company is in its quiet period ahead of its quarterly earnings report later this month.

During his final remarks, Chen also talked up plans to license the company’s 45,000 patents.

“I’m not a believer in holding on to your secret sauces,” Chen said, adding that more than half of the company’s workforce is in engineering and creation of intellectual property and that it is important for shareholders that the company make the most of that value.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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