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The BlackBerry Z10 with the U.K. flag added via Photoshop.
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3 days ago, the company formerly known as RIM pulled out all the
stops at a super-swanky event in New York to launch two new phones that
will either kill or cure the company.
Despite the global launch happening in the U.S., America will be the last in the first batch of countries to see the Z10, BlackBerry's first phone to ship with its new OS, BlackBerry 10.
Americans have to wait until March to buy the touch-screen phone, but
it became available to buy in the U.K. yesterday. That's six days ahead
even of BlackBerry's home market in Canada. On the face of it, this
seems like a strange decision: why release the Z10 in a relatively small
country first?
The overriding reason, according to Francisco Jeronimo, research
manager for European Mobile Devices at IDC, is that the U.K. is the
biggest BlackBerry market in the world. Contrast his figures: in the
third quarter of 2012, BlackBerry had a 12 percent market share in the
U.K., with Apple at 25 percent. In the U.S., BlackBerry accounted for
just 2 percent to Apple's 25 percent.
Speaking, a BlackBerry senior VP Andrew
Bocking echoed this point: "The U.K. has been a key market for us for so
long. We have over 8 million BlackBerry users today in the U.K. and we
are very excited for them to be on the leading edge getting access to
BB10 on the Z10."
