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The latest news concerning BlackBerry is that the company shook hands with none other than retail giant Amazon in order to deliver the new BlackBerry 10.3 together with more than 200,000 Amazon apps available in the Amazon App Store.
A company blog post dating yesterday says:
We’ve heard your appeals for access to more applications for your BlackBerry 10 device and we are delivering. We have announced a licensing agreement for the Amazon Appstore to bring more than 200,000 Android apps to you this fall when the BlackBerry 10.3 operating system launches.
While Amazon didn’t comment on this deal yet, which is not surprising since everybody (and especially Jeff Bezos) was busy with showcasing the new Amazon Fire smartphone, John Chen from BlackBerry confirmed the news. In an interview for the press, the company’s CEO stated that
We can leverage what [Amazon] can offer, while providing the Seattle, Wash., company with access to BlackBerry’s customer base.
It seems like a good deal for both brands, but it can be a life saver for BlackBerry. Since John Chen admitted more than once that he aimed to regain its corporate and enterprise niche, offering its individual customers access to almost all Amazon apps starting this fall will save him time and money. The BlackBerry app store is a corner shop compared to a supermarket, and the supermarket is, of course, represented by Apple’s and Google’s app stores. However, the new BlackBerry 10.3 will come together with a preloaded Amazon app store, giving BlackBerry users the chance to access movies, TV shows, games and so on.
In the meantime, John Chen will focus on the enterprise niche, as the company invests in other bigger projects:
Chen wants to remain a competitor in the smartphone segment but is focused on making BlackBerry a dominant force in machine-to-machine communications. The company’s QNX software already is a mainstay in the automobile industry, powering electronic and other systems in a wide range of cars. BlackBerry already works with hundreds of large enterprise clients, including corporations and government agencies, to manage and secure mobile devices on their internal networks.
Given the fact that Amazon just released its new 3D smartphone, the problem is whether this new development will affect the partnership with BlackBerry. John Chen stated that the two companies had different goals and their collaboration was strong and beneficial.
