Way back in June this year there was talk of BlackBerry’s BBM service being pre-installed on smartphones that don’t carry BlackBerry’s branding. It was little more than speculation back then but at least one smartphone manufacturer will be taking that route in the near future by offering the messaging service to users out of the box – LG, to be exact.
BlackBerry has announced that, starting with LG’s G Pro Lite handset, the South Korean company will be outfitting some models of smartphone with BlackBerry Messenger as a standard app. The reasoning for the app’s inclusion, given by Kevin Shin, LG’s Vice President of Marketing for Asia, the Middle East and CIS, is that “BBM is widely used throughout the Middle East, Africa and Indonesia where smartphone users tend to engage heavily in social networking.”
Whether the messaging app will be a stock feature of other LG smartphones isn’t confirmed so this could be LG and BlackBerry just testing the waters. BlackBerry’s sales in countries like South Africa, where the brand retains its popularity, could see a dip as a result of the move. Or perhaps this is just a once-off from LG and BlackBerry’s devices and little will change in the market.
Source: The Verge