14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Canadian mobile phone maker BlackBerry officially announced its financial performance for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2014, and took its time to unveil some details on how things are going for its BlackBerry Messenger service.
Currently sitting nicely at 113 million registered users and at 85 million monthly active users, BBM is one of the most popular messaging services in the world.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been pushed to all platforms out there as of now, and BlackBerry appears set to change that in the not too distant future.
To be more precise, the company has reiterated plans to bring BBM to Windows Phone, after officially confirming them this last month during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
What’s more, the smartphone maker also announced that the BBM app and service will come pre-loaded on Nokia Lumia devices in certain markets, following the official release on the Windows Phone platform, as techcrunch reports.
This will happen sometime in the second quarter of BlackBerry’s current fiscal year, which suggests that we might actually be able to learn some more info on the matter as soon as the next week, when Microsoft makes Windows Phone 8.1 official at the BUILD conference.
At the moment, BBM is available for the owners of Android, BlackBerry, and iOS devices, and it is also available on Nokia X devices, which run a forked flavor of Google’s mobile operating system.
Moving forth, BlackBerry might also release the service on desktop, which will certainly ensure wider reach, especially if it features syncing with mobile devices.
Clearly, BBM needs to grab more users in order to be able to stay competitive, and its presence on Nokia Lumia devices out of the box might help it a lot in this direction.
Sales of Windows Phone handsets might not be too high at the moment, at least when compared to Android and iOS, but they are on the rise and are expected to increase further in the years ahead.
Moreover, the presence of BBM on such devices, complemented by the availability of other popular apps and services out there for Windows Phone, will certainly attract more users to the platform.
Thus, having BBM pre-loaded on certain Nokia Lumia smartphones could prove beneficial for both parties, not to mention that users will have to gain as well from this.
What remains to be seen is when exactly BlackBerry’s service arrives on Windows Phone and which Lumia handsets feature it right from the start. My guess is that entry-level phones destined for emerging markets will be the first to have it.