Less than a week from when BlackBerry’s Z10 will make its debut on AT&T, the company’s CEO is taking shots at Apple.
In an interview with Australian Financial Review, Thorsten Heins showed reverence for the iPhone and its user interface but also seemed to indicate that Apple had fallen behind in regards to innovation, pointing out that the iPhone UI is “five years old.”
Heins went on to say that the new BlackBerry phones are now better at multi-tasking than the iPhone.
Attracting big name apps to BlackBerry has been one of the platform’s biggest challenges. Heins said he expects 100,000 apps to be available when the Z10 launches later this week in the United States. He added that negotiations with Instagram and Netflix to land dedicated BlackBerry apps for those services are making progress.
In January, BlackBerry officially announced its totally revamped BlackBerry 10 operating system as well as two new phones, the all-touch Z10 and the touchscreen plus QWERTY keyboard Q10.
BlackBerry once held a dominant share of the U.S. smartphone OS market share but in recent years it has seen its piece of pie shrink dramatically while Android and iOS have claimed the vast majority.
The Z10 has already been released in multiple countries. In addition to AT&T, the Z10 is coming to Verizon and T-Mobile. Last week, BlackBerry said it had received an order for one million Z10s from an unnamed “partner.”
