Blackberry’s most loyal customer has always been the US government. But it looks like things are changing, for the Senate at least. According to a memo, the US Senate is ending its years-long relationship with Blackberry.
The memo, obtained by reporter Jim Swift, says that once the Senate runs out of on-hand BlackBerry devices (Classic, Passport, Z10, Z30, Q10), that’s it. No worries though, Verizon will supposedly be allowing easier transfers to a Samsung Galaxy S6 (not the S7 for some reason) and the new iPhone SE will even be added to the approved devices list for all those small-handed staffers out there.
Barack Obama has famously been held hostage to his own Blackberry device, even though he prefers an iPhone. Hillary Clinton, who was a US Senator from 2001 to 2009, has also openly admitted that she’s secretly an iPhone (and iPad) fan during an interview last year, saying:
There are reasons why you start out in Washington on a Blackberry, you stay on it in many instances. But, I never throw anything away. I’m two steps away from being a hoarder.
That’s about as close as you can get to calling Blackberry trash without actually calling it trash.
It doesn’t help that Blackberry’s BB OS 10 also took a huge hit in March when Facebook announced that it would drop support for the platform. The Obama’s staff was allowed to use iPhones a month later. Even Blackberry itself has forsaken its own software, releasing the Blackberry Priv last year running Android.
So it looks like the next administration will face the same difficult decision many of us have dealt with for many years — Apple or Android?