Whilst BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) might not be seen as an attractive messaging application as it once was, due to the decline in popularity of the BlackBerry Operating System (OS), in some countries it is still continuing to thrive. Worldwide we are possibly looking at over 190 million users, with about 60 million located in Indonesia, a country that has recently had the Samsung Z2 released there.
Many Indonesian smartphone users were apparently apprehensive about moving over to the Tizen OS, due to it not supporting BBM, as the messaging app is used by over 90% of smartphone users there. But it looks like they might not have to worry so much.
Matthew Talbot, CEO of BBM, has confirmed to the website Selular.ID that BBM is currently being developed for the Tizen OS. According to him, “Tizen OS is not much different to the Android OS. So it’s not a difficult thing for an Android application developer, to create Tizen applications.” When asked when we could expect to see BBM land in the Tizen Store, Matthew could not give a definite answer, but did state there was no definite timetable, just a matter of time.”
The Samsung Z2 was well received in Indonesia, when it went on sale in October this year, as this was an affordable 4G smartphone that sold at Rp 899.000 ($70 approx). It is however thought that the lack of BBM support did put some potential customers off purchasing the device.
The Z2 features a 4-inch TFT 400×800 touchscreen, 5MP primary camera with LED flash and a VGA secondary front facing camera. The Smartphone is powered by an embedded Spreadtrum SC9830 SOC, which has a Quad Core 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex A7 CPU and the Mali 400 MP2 GPU. You have 8Gb internal storage with external MicroSD card support, 1 GB RAM, dual sim support, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, with a 1,500 mah Li-ion battery.
Do you use BBM? Let us know in the comments.
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