Baig: Latest BlackBerry upheaval is final nail

NEW YORK — The news this morning that BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins was out, and that the company was abandoning its plans to go private hits like the final nail in the coffin. The $1 billion investment that Fairfax Financial Holdings and others are making hardly gives anyone a sense of confidence that BlackBerry is going to somehow going to revive itself, certainly not in any meaningful way. Investors apparently concur, with already beleaguered shares plunging more than 16% as I write these words.

Back in January when BlackBerry introduced the Z10 smartphone, the company's first to run the BlackBerry 10 operating system that the former Research In Motion had pinned its hopes on, I had hope for BlackBerry too. I wrote at the time that the phone was "very much good enough to keep BlackBerry in the game," even as I expressed pessimism that BlackBerry would ever return to the glory days.

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Well, BlackBerry might have stayed in the game a little bit longer. Heck, the Q10 device with the kind of physical keyboard BlackBerry loyalists were enamored with on earlier generation handsets was still a few months away. But the company lost that game badly, slaughtered by Apple's iOS, Google's Android, even Microsoft's Windows Phone.

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As an unscientific measure of these things, I was recently given the BlackBerry Z30 to try out, the company's latest handset. It has a 5-inch display, runs the 10.2 upgrade to the BlackBerry OS, and boasts long battery life. In other words it has all the appearances of a solid phone.

But where new BlackBerrys were once highly coveted by reviewers (and others) and I added it to the list of products that I would consider reviewing, it hardly jumped to the top of that list, especially in this crowded ! pre-holiday season. Does anyone really care more about the BlackBerry Z30 these days then, say, the Google Nexus 5 or the iPad Air?

In an email I received this morning, tech analyst Jeff Kagan summed it up succinctly: "Right now there are no real answers for BlackBerry. That is a very uncomfortable place to be for investors, customers, workers and partners."

Sadly, I cannot disagree.

Follow Ed Baig on Twitter: @edbaig.