A series of videos released by BlackBerry provided more information regarding the company's highly anticipated new product, BBM Protected.
The videos of BBM Protected, also known as BBM for Enterprise or eBBM, were shown in the BlackBerry Experience Washington event held earlier this week.
BlackBerry announced its plans to release BBM Protected in February earlier this year. The company decided to make more developments on their BlackBerry Messenger product in response to the popularity of other messaging services such as WhatsApp, planning to release the product to corporations that highly value information and communications security.
BBM Protected, which will be released in June, and will use Suite B compliant encryption, which is the minimum requirement for sending classified communications for the U.S. government. This is in addition to BlackBerry's BBM "scrambling" encryption.
What this means is that each message sent through BBM Protected will each have a unique encryption key, so even if a hacker would be able to crack the encryption, it would only be for one message. This is unlike the encryption used for other messaging apps, wherein the encryption used is the same for all messages. If a hacker cracks the encryption code, the whole conversation will be decoded.
Upon its release in June, BlackBerry will only make BBM Protected available to corporate-controlled BlackBerry devices as part of an enterprise suite, which will include BlackBerry OS 6 and higher. The service will have a monthly subscription fee, which will generate further revenue for BlackBerry in lieu of the incorporated advertisements and in-app purchases that the company is planning to add to BlackBerry Messenger.
Phones using BlackBerry Balance will have to wait until early fall to use the chat client, while iOS and Android users will have to wait until late fall or early winter.
Over 85 million people use BlackBerry Messenger per month, with 65% of this population using the messaging service daily. This percentage is much higher than the percentage of Facebook users logging on to their accounts daily.
BlackBerry also has plans to expand BlackBerry Messenger to Windows Phone and Nokia X platforms within the summer.
In March this year, reports surfaced saying that the White House was testing LG and Samsung smartphones to replace their BlackBerry handsets. BlackBerry released a statement that defended the company's contract with the U.S. government, saying that the handsets are the only ones that are secure enough for communications within the White House.
