If you are a smartphone user and take pride in the phone brand you are using (yes, most users do…) you have for sure noticed the 5-day media frenzy over president Barack Obama’s alleged switching from Blackberry to Samsung… that was promptly denied by the White House and of course by Blackberry, as well. Here’s a taste of the newspaper stories…
Mar 20th … WSJ: “BlackBerry Suffers Blow as White House Tests Samsung, LG Phones”
Mar 21st … The Guardian: “President Obama considers ditching his BlackBerry for a Samsung”
Mar 22nd … The Verge: “President Obama may ditch his BlackBerry for an Android phone”
Mar 23rd … Silicon Beat: “BlackBerry apparently still ‘in’ at Obama White House”
Mar 24th … Times of India: “White House denies Obama dumping BlackBerry”
Regardless whether there is any truth behind all of this… OR it is a story that started from nothing, went on to live its virtual life, and Obama will continue to hold onto his Blackberry …
The fact is that if he does continue to use it, he could be, in the not so distant future, the only remaining Blackberry user. And that is sad. Sad because I used to have one before switching to a Nokia E71/72 in 2008 and then to Samsung in 2012. I liked the ‘berry back then and its side wheel.
But clearly the world is moving on. We ran a survey with our AVAST users in December and among other things asked them which smartphone brand they have and IF they were considering buying a new phone in the next 3 months WHICH brand would it be. Blackberry has just lost it. It had the lowest loyalty among all mainstream smartphone brands. While 76% of iPhone users say their next purchase will again be iPhone, Blackberry will hold on to only 28% of those surveyed – as the majority will switch to Samsung (37%) and iPhone (14%). As it was, Blackberry had only 1.6% market share in December. Losing 72% of your users with every replacement cycle leads to “being history” quite fast.
I actually hope Blackberry would fix that.
PS: Dear Barack, just in case Blackberry doesn’t fix it and you indeed switch to Samsung… make sure you install our avast! Mobile Security. Our servers are in Europe and well outside NSA jurisdiction. Just saying… 