Unnamed BlackBerry partner purchases 1 million BlackBerry 10 devices
The folks at CrackBerry.com just posted a press release from BlackBerry stating that one of their partners just placed an order for 1 million BlackBerry 10 devices, with shipments to start immediately. This is the largest single purchase order in BlackBerry's history. It's now time to play the guessing game to see if anyone can figure out who made the purchase.
My first thought was that Kevin Michaluk may have made the purchase in honor of my birthday today so that I could hand them out to my closest million friends, but that is not the case. It will be interesting to hear if it is a government agency or private company who made the purchase. I am also curious to hear if they are an existing BlackBerry customer, are moving from another platform, or just a newer company making their first large smartphone purchase.
I wonder if wireless carriers can be considered as one of the purchasers here. Note that they do say "partner" in the press release and not "customer". This makes me even more curious about the deal here. If it is a carrier partner, such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, or T-Mobile, then they still need to sell those to customers. Even if it is a carrier partner though, 1 million devices is quite a vote of confidence in the new OS.
This appears to be great news for BlackBerry, especially with the US release just around the corner.
BlackBerry also issued another press release today for the release of WhatsApp Messenger for BB10. I have tried it on other smartphone before, but don't have enough friends using it yet to be very useful. BlackBerry has been talking about this release quite a bit, which is interesting given they already have their own BlackBerry Messenger client on BB10 phones. This does help people who use WhatsApp on other platforms make the move the BB10 though so I think that is the focus.
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