14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker BlackBerry is losing more and more ground on the smartphone market, and it appears that there are not only users who abandon it, but partners as well.
What’s worse is that the company is losing partners even in its homeland market Canada, where wireless carriers have started to remove BlackBerry smartphones from their lineups.
One of them is Fido, which no longer lists BlackBerry phones on its website, as can be seen in the screenshots attached to this article.
The move comes only several months after Canada’s Rogers refused to add the BlackBerry Z30 handset to its lineup, although it was released as BlackBerry’s latest flagship smartphone.
BlackBerry has been a strong brand in Canada for a long time, though the multitude of Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices out there are slowly pushing it to the edge.
Carriers in other markets out there also feel that BlackBerry is no longer a viable option for their customers, such as Three UK, which recently said that they might be removing all of the BlackBerry smartphones from their offering at the end of this year.
Up until last quarter, BlackBerry was still the third mobile operating system in the world, but its presence on the market is continuously diminishing, and Windows Phone has already managed to take its position, with only Android and iOS in front.
As WMPoweruser notes, the fact that carriers are pushing BlackBerry’s devices aside should prove a great move for Windows Phone, as handsets running under this OS will be more visible to users, thus creating more purchase opportunities.
With Rogers and Fido already showing lack of interest in smartphones coming from BlackBerry, it will be only a matter of time before other mobile phone carriers in the country make a similar move.
Undoubtedly, should it launch smartphones with great potential, wireless carriers will reconsider their position towards the platform, and we might see Fido listing BlackBerry on its website once again.
At the moment, as can be seen in the second screenshot above, the former BlackBerry page on Fido’s portal is blank. In fact, the category is no longer available on the carrier’s home page.
The Canadian phone maker is expected to bring to the market some more devices before the end of this year, and it remains to be seen whether they will be capable of turning the table in its favor. If not, we might see BlackBerry taking the same road that Palm and webOS took back in 2010.