14 DAY TRIAL // Last month, BlackBerry officially announced that its BlackBerry Messenger service will soon be available for the owners of devices running under more mobile operating systems out there, namely Android and iOS.
It seems that it is actually looking to achieve more than that.
Dedicated BBM mobile clients will be released for Android and iOS later this summer, yet new reports suggest that the company might also aim at having the app pre-loaded on specific devices.
"There is interest from other handset makers," BlackBerry Chief Operating Officer Kristian Tear said, according to a recent article on CNET.
Unfortunately, he did not provide specific info on when the service will go live for the owners of said devices, but rumor has it that we’ll be able to see it before the end of this month.
However, Tear did say that BBM has a large customer base and that it is being used as the primary means of communication by users in a wide range of markets.
Apparently, it is these markets that handset vendors would like to target with smartphones packing BBM on them right from the get-go. No details on what companies are interested in the service were delivered.
According to the aforementioned report, BlackBerry is also confident that its BlackBerry 10 platform will prove highly successful, and that the availability of BBM on more platforms won’t pose a threat to its own devices.
"We don't feel like that is a risk. Obviously, if we did, we might have acted differently." Tear reportedly stated when asked whether users won’t drop BlackBerry but keep BBM accounts for use on Android and iOS.
"BBM is a strong platform that provides a different way of communicating," he also said. At the moment, the BlackBerry Messenger service has an active customer base of 61 million.