Daily Tech Briefing: April 11, 2014

Despite the fact that BlackBerry announced a fiscal 2014 third-quarter loss of $4.4 billion during its December 20th earnings call, BlackBerry CEO John Chen recently stated that the company has no plans to exit the smartphone handset business.

Chen explained that BlackBerry is committed to the handset business and the company is working hard to make it profitable. Blackberry still has a five-year deal with Foxconn, its China-based manufacturing partner, and Foxconn is expected to help the company create a new smartphone that will bring back many of the dedicated on-phone features that users have said they miss.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced on April 9 that the company will introduce a new Simple Starter plan. This was part of the company’s three days of “un-carrier announcements.” The plan goes for $40 a month and the company stated that there will never be any overage fees. Simple Starter comes with unlimited talk and text and 500 megabytes of data at 4G LTE speeds.

According to recent numbers released by Gartner and IDC, Microsoft’s move to end support for Windows XP may have helped slow the decline of the PC market. There has been a slide in worldwide PC shipments in response to the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets.

While many have been reluctant to give up Windows XP, enough organizations decided to make the switch to slow the decline in PC shipments. Loren Loverde, vice president of Worldwide PC Trackers for IDC, said that along with smartphones and tablets, economic concerns may also have contributed to slumps in PC sales.

Finally, enterprise Windows XP users can get $200 rebates on any Google Chromebook if they also sign up for a desktop-as-a-service subscription from VMware for at least one year. This is all part of the effort to encourage people to move to a new operating system since Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP.