As BlackBerry decides to discontinue most of its BlackBerry 10 OS devices, the U.S, Senate also decided to not issue anymore BlackBerries to staffers.
According to PCMag, Senate staffers received a memo announcing that they will no longer receive any BlackBerry devices going forward. However, BlackBerry will continue to offer support for the devices still in use.
The message was sent on Wednesday, June 29, to administrative managers, chief clerks and system administrators. Thanks to designing devices with physical keyboards and a reputation for security, for more than a decade BlackBerry has been the vendor of choice among government officials. However, iOS and Android devices have been pushing over the years BlackBerry out of the market.
Tech Times reports that, while this is indeed a major change, BlackBerry is not about to discontinue all of its BlackBerry 10 devices. People still be able to buy BlackBerry 10 handsets, such as the Q10.
A line in the letter stating that BlackBerry has notified carriers such as Verizon and AT&T that all production of BlackBerry OS 10 devices has been discontinued, including the Passport, Classic, Z10, Z30 and Q10. However, BlackBerry came to correct its initial statement in an announcement shared with CrackBerry.
According to the clarification made by the company, only the manufacturing cycle of the BlackBerry Classic will be discontinued. The rest of the BlackBerry 10 line of devices will continue to be manufactured. This means that BlackBerry is merely changing its device line up, a common venture among most other hardware vendors.
The company also declared that it will continue to actively support sales of the BlackBerry 10 line of smartphones to customers in most of the markets. BlackBerry added that there will be a seamless transition for customers choosing its Android device as their next smartphone. The company aims to make the transition to producing Android smartphones without any compromise to the security of its operations or mobile platform.
