BlackBerry unveils Porsche-designed smartphone priced at over $2000

TORONTO – Canadian smartphone-maker Blackberry has teamed up with luxury car-maker Porsche to unveil a new smartphone priced at over US$2000.

The touch-screen Porsche Design P’9982 BlackBerry – which will only be available at Porsche Design stores and retailers including Harrods in London, England – is designed using stainless steel and Italian leather. The special edition will be finished in “genuine Crocodile leather.”

The phones will even bear a “special series of PIN numbers” so that owners will be “instantly recognizable in the exclusive world of Porsche Design smartphone owners,” according to BlackBerry’s press release.

Its suggested retail price is a whopping US$2,350.

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But the device totes the same tech specs as the BlackBerry Z10, which had poor reception from consumers and resulted in BlackBerry writing off almost $1 billion in unsold inventory.

This isn’t the first time that BlackBerry has teamed up with Porsche to design a luxury smartphone.

BlackBerry released the BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9981 in 2011, complete with an enhanced version of the company’s once-iconic QWERTY keyboard design.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the first Porsche phone sold well at Harrods and in cities like Dubai.

But the Waterloo, Ont. smartphone-maker is in a very different place now than it was when it released the P’9981. The company is in the midst of large-scale layoffs after failing to take itself private – its future growing more uncertain by the day.

READ MORE: BlackBerry lays off another 250 employees in Waterloo

The potential success of the Porsche-designed handset is doubtful according to some tech experts.

“As a work of art, there is a place for the P9982, but even with the leather and steel, even with the increased storage, and even with the promise of future updates, will anyone be strong enough to buy in not just to the BlackBerry 10 platform, but buy in with enough confidence that they want to be seen to be buying the luxury version of the handset,” wrote Forbes contributor Ewan Spence.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski added,” If there’s a believable rationale for marketing a fancy-pants version of the smartphone that forced you to write off nearly $1 billion in unsold inventory earlier this year, I can’t think of one; the fact that this thing was in BlackBerry’s pipeline at all is troubling.”