There is more good news coming from BlackBerry today. Following yesterday’s appointment of John Sims as President, Global Enterprise Services, the company today announced a new a bundling agreement with LG Electronics that will see BBM installed preloaded on LG smartphones. The LG G Pro Lite will be the first LG device to offer BBM out-of-the-box.
“People across the globe are using BBM to connect with each other and the enthusiasm has been phenomenal,” said Andrew Bocking, Executive Vice President for BBM at BlackBerry. “We’re extremely pleased that LG Electronics will help bring their customers a more seamless experience with BBM by preloading the app, starting with the G Pro Lite in key markets.”
LG will use both standard and virtual preloading (using the LG App Manager) to offer BBM to its customers. It will also continue to be available to them as a free download through Google Play.
It will be interesting to see if other manufacturers follow in LG’s footsteps.
BlackBerry launched BBM for Android and iOS in October. Within the first week, it had gained about 20 million new users. It has promised to update BBM “in the coming months” with support for BBM Channels, BBM Voice calling and BBM Video calling.
Update: BlackBerry Canada issued a statement indicating that this agreement will not extend to Canada at this point in time:
“LG is making the in-country availability decisions, and at this time, there are no plans to make BBM available via a preload in Canada. However, LG users can still download BBM for free from Android app stores.”
Source : BlackBerry