Weekend news detail often gives us the chance to catch up on some of the more unusual rumours swirling about the mobile scene, and right now a lot of it has to do with RIM, no surprise given the upcoming BlackBerry 10 launch on January 30.
So work in the old pinch of salt analogy however you like on this one: apparently Chinese PC giant Lenovo is said to be considering a move to acquire the BlackBerry maker to boost its presence in the smartphone arena.
It goes like this: Bloomberg reports that Lenovo is looking at a number of options to raise its smartphone game, with CFO Wong Wai Ming having name-dropped acquiring RIM as one of those options in an interview this week.
“We are looking at all opportunities – RIM and many others,” Ming is reported to have said in Switzerland through the week. “We’ll have no hesitation if the right opportunity comes along that could benefit us and shareholders.”
That's of course well short of the opening moves of an actual bid, of course. But with RIM's current newsworthiness due to the BB10 launch there's as much speculation swirling around as to what will happen if the platform proves a flop as there is should it prove a success.
RIM itself has hinted a few times that it would be open to licensing BlackBerry 10 to other hardware makers, which has triggered further speculation that it may look to focus purely on the software side of things and ditch its handset division should the OS prove more popular than the BlackBerry phones themselves.
It's still far from a logical fit given Lenovo's current focus on all things Android – the company dished up its latest offering, the jumbo 5.5in Intel-based K900 at CES at the start of the month. On the tablet/PC scene, meanwhile, its Windows legacy is long established.
But with Lenovo among several Chinese smartphone makers openly looking to increase their US smartphone market presence, targeting a company like RIM would certainly be one potential way of doing that.
As Bloomberg points out, though, RIM itself has already shown wariness to expand its operations in China due to sensitivity over security matters. And given existing ripples of discontent between the US and China over things like ZTE's lack of deference to American business sanctions against Iran, and Google's long-running censorship issues with the Beijing government, any deal would have significant obstacles and question marks to overcome.
Definitely one to file in the idle speculation column for the time being.
