When it comes to news surrounding BBM, there was plenty of it coming out of Mobile World Congress but it was a rather off the cuff comment made by BlackBerry CEO, John Chen that caught my attention when he was asked about the WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook and whether or not it changes the strategy for BlackBerry and BBM.
No, not really. We have always been working on putting BBM on every phone there is. You can even argue on every device there is, even beyond a phone. We believe the world is going to go a machine to machine world. Even at the Qualcomm booth where we have the QNX car, you should go take a look at the dashboard. And we definitely want to put BBM into the hands of enterprise. It's secure, and there's features we can give them that they need.
That comment is open to a lot of interpretation but it fuels the notion that BBM will be coming to the desktop yet again as we've seen from some previous leaks and unexplained appearances of the Enterprise software, BlackBerry Blend. With the QNX mention, it also opens up the idea to implementing BBM in automobiles and more. Who knows? Maybe the next time you visit the hospital, even your hospital bed could have BBM built into it.
Read more
Mobile World Congress trade show gets a U.S. version
The GSMA group, which runs the annual Mobile World Congress trade show, is teaming up with CTIA to launch Mobile World Congress Americas. It will be held September 12-14, 2017 in San Francisco and will replace the CTIA Super Mobility show that year. The 2016 show will still be held on September 7-9 in Las Vegas.
Virgin Atlantic to show off BBM on in-flight ads
Seeing advertising for BBM seems to be pretty thin on the ground as far as I can tell - unless I'm missing something. The word on the street is that the following video was created by UK design company Pope Wainwright for use on Virgin Atlantic flights. We haven't really seen any videos of this sort used by airlines in the past, but this one is a real gem. From the Pope Wainwright...
This is BlackBerry's four-pillar device strategy
The last of our interviews with the BlackBerry folks at Mobile World Congress was Francois Mahieu, VP of Global Product Management. He walked us through BlackBerry's device strategy, which is timely given the announcement of the Z3 and the Classic Q20. Mahieu outlined in broad strokes four major categories of phones from here on in. Starting at the lower end are devices like the Q5...
How BlackBerry is defending its enterprise stronghold
At Mobile World Congress, we caught up with John Sims, the president of enterprise at BlackBerry. He filled us in on how BlackBerry is currently defending its leadership in the sphere of business mobility. BBM is becoming a bigger part of the enterprise picture for BlackBerry, but that doesn't mean the more consumer-focused updates don't trickle over. For example, the recent update to...