Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
BlackBerry’s Z10 went on sale in Canada on February 5th and both BlackBerry and Rogers say that it is the best selling BlackBerry smartphone on day one yet.
A statement from BlackBerry (formerly known as Research In Motion) noted:
“In Canada, yesterday was the best day ever for the first day of a launch of a new BlackBerry smartphone. In fact, it was more than 50% better than any other launch day in our history in Canada,” said Thorsten Heins, President & CEO of BlackBerry. “In the UK, we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone.”
The new smartphone features the BB10 operating system and a multi-touch gesture focused 4.2-inch screen, 4G-LTE connectivity, an 8 Megapixel camera, a removable battery, Near Field Communications as well as a 1.5Ghz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and 2 GB of RAM. It is BlackBerry’s first device with the new modern OS and was clearly designed to target Apple’s iPhone as well as various Android smartphones from Samsung, HTC, Motorola and LG.
I attended the launch event in downtown Toronto with BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins as well as Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed ushering the new era of BlackBerry in Canada. On hand at the special event were the first 20 customers who pre-ordered the Z10.
The first BlackBerry Z10 customer in Canada activates his Rogers device.
Rogers later on shared the news about BlackBerry Z10 sales based on Day 1. Below is their statement.
• We have sold more BlackBerry smartphones on February 5th 2013 than any other day in Rogers history (Rogers was the first carrier to launch BlackBerry services in 1999).
• Rogers BlackBerry experts activated thousands of BlackBerry Z10 smartphones yesterday, and provided customers with in depth training and support.
• Some stores have temporarily sold out of the BlackBerry Z10 and additional inventory has been shipped to Rogers retail locations across Canada.
No specific figures on sales or activations were released as of this writing but we expect to hear from Rogers and from other carriers in the coming weeks.
This early news bodes well for BlackBerry who is hoping to reclaim user support in its home turf before it releases the Z10 to the US market (delays are due to carriers there testing the newly released handset.) The other BlackBerry smartphone model, QWERTY keyboard-enabled Q10, is expected to generate even more interest when it comes to market in April.
