This has been a busy week for T-Mobile. First, the Un-carrier announced its counter attack against Verizon to lure subscribers; and now, it's cozying up to BlackBerry and will be its carrier to debut the handset maker's enterprise Classic smartphone.
The partnership effort, which will deliver the BlackBerry Classic to T-Mobile customers on May 13, also apparently ends a feud between the enterprise smartphone player and the fourth-place U.S. telecom.
According to one report, BlackBerry CEO John Chen, in an editorial for a media outlet, stated "the bigger the break-up, the better the make-up." The BlackBerry chief also reportedly claimed he's willing to don a T-Mobile t-shirt if given one.
That feud started when T-Mobile decided to try to lure its subscribers who were using BlackBerry handsets to switch over to the iPhone, which then prompted BlackBerry to rip up its licensing agreement with T-Mobile.
The BlackBerry offering via T-Mobile will offer customers the opportunity to grab the Classic on a two-year purchase plan of $18.33 a month, with no money down. According to a press release issued by BlackBerry, T-Mobile has 57 million individual and business customers.
"This new partnership begins by bringing together the productivity and security of the BlackBerry Classic and T-Mobile's industry-rattling Un-carrier for Business initiative," states the release.
"Together with T-Mobile, we hope to deliver highly differentiated solutions that appeal to our mutual users: the power professionals who depend on their smartphones to get things done and make things happen," states Chen in the press announcement.
T-Mobile CEO and president John Legere, says the BlackBerry Classic "stokes Un-carrier 9.0, which is all about bringing the Un-carrier revolution to business."
As Tech Times reported earlier this week, T-Mobile is aggressively pursuing Verizon's customer base with a new marketing program that rips off from Verizon's marketing campaign, #neversettle. T-Mobile's ad is #neversettleforVerizon and offers Verizon customers a no-cost move to T-Mobile and even a no-cost move back to Verizon if they decide to leave the Un-carrier.
The BlackBerry Classic hit the market in 2014, and brought back some familiar form factor features long beloved by the BlackBerry crowd, such as the physical QWERTY keyboard and 22 hours of battery power.
