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Senate Staffers Will No Longer Be Issued BlackBerry Devices (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Senate staffers will no longer be issued BlackBerry devices. According to Politico, a note sent to staffers on Wednesday said the Senate had no choice after BlackBerry decided to discontinue devices running its own BlackBerry 10 software. "Once we have exhausted our current in-house stock, new device procurements will be limited, while supplies last, to warranty exchanges only," reads the Sergeant at Arms note. The 600 BlackBerry smartphones currently in the Senate's possession will be supported for the "foreseeable future." The news comes after a report that President Obama has ditched his BlackBerry handset in favor of a "hardened" version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that is supported by the Defense Information Systems Agency. It also follows a report that the Canadian smartphone maker lost $670 million in the first quarter of its 2017 financial year. During BlackBerry's first quarter, the company sold roughly 500,000 devices at an average price of $290 each. They will apparently need to sell about three million phones at an average of $300 each to break even.
...to buy them cheap for their IP...and to keep others from doing the same thing.
As always with Blackberry stories this news is based on incorrect information. According to Crackberry the Senate was informed that the Blackberry Classic phone, which does run BBOS10 is being discontinued not all phones running the BBOS10 operating system. Blackberry is continuing to update the operating system with a new version 3.3 in the final release now.
http://crackberry.com/us-senat...
Blackberry now owns Good Technology.
It takes the 3 letter agencies some time to vet the procurement and harden the ROM.
Wikipedia cites a list of approved devices for Samsung Knox from 2014 which lists the S5 too. Presumably others will be added over time.
Plus, the US taxpayer saves money if federal officials buy up existing stocks on ebay rather than buy the flagship S7.
I'm sure the government is somehow contriving to pay more for an S4 than I would pay for an S7.
I'm sure it's great but how long do you expect it to get updates?
Did you own a playbook? It was great too. If I lost it I wouldn't even have to worry about my email leaking out because everything was on my tethered phone. It had flash and great multi-tasking. It COULD have run android apps similar to os 10.3 but Blackberry abandoned it. It's now a doorstop.
I liked my z10 and z30 also... it ran most android apps quite well. My z30 sucked when hooked up to bes because my it team didn't update bes and you couldn't copy and past from work space (email) into personal space (phone dialer) and occasionally it would crash the entire android run-time and all running apps after it ran out of memory. Recently BlackBerry has given up working with Facebook and turned off the native Facebook app pushing an update to remove the native app, the ability to upload photos and synchronize address books.
I was a loyal blackberry fan but I've been burned too many times. I will not own another blackberry product without an unlock-able boot loader. Especially not while the CEO states the company will get out of the phone business if they can't make money from it - Funny BlackBerry’s John Chen tops the list of Canadian top 100 earning CEOs at $89 million as he drives the company into the ground
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone