YouTube/Ganganam Aarya

A word war is brewing between telecom giant T-Mobile and mobile phonemaker BlackBerry.

The initial salvo came from BlackBerry CEO John Chen who criticised T-Mobile in the company's official blog for sending email messages to BlackBerry users, encouraging them to drop their Canadian phones and switch to Apple's iPhone.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere initially issued formal apologies for making the offer and promised not to repeat it.

However, in his Twitter feed on Wednesday, Mr Legere said he would no longer debate with Mr Chen on Twitter because the latter is not on the popular microblogging site. Sarcastically, Mr Legere said he would check if the BlackBerry CEO is in MySpace.

YouTube/TapTapculture

The remark is a veiled reference to two companies that were once on top of their game but are now gasping for life, pummeled by competitors - Samsung and Apple for BlackBerry and Facebook for MySpace.

BlackBerry continues to try to regain its old glory lost to the smartphone makers from Seoul and Cupertino by releasing new models, but its Z30 rolled out in October 2013 bombed out, causing a deep cut in the Waterloo-based company's finances, leading to downsizing and thousands of job cuts.

YouTube/Actis Gutieres

On Thursday, Mobilesyrup.com reported that BlackBerry would soon replace its current flagship, the unpopular Z30, with the rumoured Ontario and Windermere models.

Ontario is speculated to have a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM and would run on BlackBerry OS 10.3. The Windermere, on the other hand, would likely have a new keyboard design and is possibly wider than any other BlackBerry device, the largest of which is the Z30 with a 5-inch screen. The keyboard, according to rumours, would sport three instead of the usual four rows, with all of the keys touch sensitive.

The Web site said that BlackBerry is putting more multitasking features into its OS such as allowing users to run two apps on the screen at the same time, side by side.

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