RIM Mulling NewBay And Assets Sale

RIM is facing troubling times as it continues to lose money, trying to stem the problem by cutting jobs and focusing development on BlackBerry 10 for a rollout in the first quarter of 2013. In the meantime, the company is hoping to sell off some unwanted assets, not unlike what Nokia has been doing as of late. According to Reuters, RIM is looking for a suitor for NewBay, its cloud services provider.

The Waterloo-based company reportedly acquired NewBay back in October 2011 for around $100 million, hoping to leverage the photo, video, and social networking tools for its smartphones. NewBay had over 80 million subscribers at the time of purchase, with RIM hoping to entice carriers to license the service for use across smartphones. It seems that plan didn't pan out, and now RIM is trying to offload the acquisition in search of cash.

RIM has been internally restructuring recently, shedding thousand of jobs in an attempt to cut back on spending. The company hopes that it will save $1 billion as part of the effort, although its recent financial results suggest that might not be enough, with the company posting a $518 million loss along with a sharp drop in revenue to $2.8 billion.

BlackBerry 10, meanwhile, has been delayed until "early" 2013. Reports suggest that RIM is readying two handsets to go along with the launch of BlackBerry 10: the L-Series will be an all-touch phone, while the N-Series comes with both a portrait QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen. Both phones are said to use OLED panels in order to save power, with the L-Series featuring a 1280x768 resolution and the N-Series carrying a 720x720 resolution.