Shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) reversed course this afternoon, as its Z10 handset went on sale in the U.S. for the first time, at AT&T (T), with the shares giving up earlier gains of as much as 4%, closing off $1.25, or almost 8%, at $14.91.
Not helping the shares, perhaps, is a piece a short while ago from Canada‘s Globe & Mail‘s Joanna Slater and Iain Marlow reporting that there are “no lineups as BlackBerry 10 arrives in U.S. stores.”
Assumedly on the scene, the authors observe,
AT&T store in the heart of Manhattan�s Times Square, there was no outward sign that Friday was a crucial day for BlackBerry in the world�s largest market for high-end smartphones � no signs, no banners and no lines. Inside the store, staff outnumbered customers. And there, at the start of nine smartphones all in a row, sat the Z10 in its American debut.
Update: The Wall Street Journal’s Drew Fitzgerald and Will Connors in their piece this afternoon characterize the matter thusly: “Research in Motion’s new BlackBerry landed with a bit of a thud in the U.S. forest of smartphones.”
The reporters, like Slater and Marlow, highlight the apparent lack of prominence given the phone at AT&T:
At two AT&T stores in Manhattan, there were neither special signs or floor displays to highlight the Z10. Apple Inc. (AAPL), on the other hand, still had its own space on the wall prominently displaying three different iPhones in the stores. At an AT&T store in downtown San Francisco, when a customer asked to see the Z10, the store’s representatives had to retrieve it from the back. The device had not been put out on display at the store’s opening because of difficulties setting it up, a store employee said. The device was eventually installed on a display at a back corner of the store, away from a large sign advertising the iPhone 5.
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