Even with a preliminary agreement with Fairfax Financial Holdings, BlackBerry is looking at other potential offers from more tech orientated companies, including the two major Android giants Google and Samsung.
There are other companies in the mix, including Cisco, LG and even Intel. Cisco currently only offers networking equipment, but with the move to mobile they could look at expanding networking equipment to mean enterprise devices.
As for LG and Samsung, this is an acquisition of talent and software, something both companies need to work on with their current Android UI skins. BlackBerry also has services that could be of use to Samsung in the near future, in terms of enterprise.
Intel is an oddball, with the major amount of revenue coming from component sales, there is no real point adding a smartphone branch to that, unless the company wants to make a first party smartphone with Intel inside.
The source has said none have placed bids for the company yet and they are only interested in the possibility of grabbing the unsuccessful Canadian smartphone maker, whether any one of them will go through with a bid is debatable.
BlackBerry has had a traumatic few years, slipping from a huge $100 billion price-tag to less than $5 billion in the short space of five years. The company did not look at Apple and Android as threats and it lost them the consumer base and in recent years has lost them countless enterprise contracts they almost took for granted.
