Sean Nero

The bat­tle for con­trol of the lo­cal smart phone mar­ket heat­ed up with the re­cent launch of the Black­ber­ry Z10 at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.The prod­uct was the first of its kind from the com­pa­ny's new mo­bile com­put­ing plat­form fol­low­ing its suc­cess­ful ac­qui­si­tion of lead­ing soft­ware com­pa­ny QNX al­most two years ago.

At the for­mal launch of the Black­ber­ry Z10 hand­set co-host­ed by Black­ber­ry and bmo­bile, Michael Mar­tin, di­rec­tor of ser­vices and new busi­ness de­vel­op­ment for Caribbean and An­dean re­gion at Black­ber­ry said: "These are very ex­cit­ing times to be at Black­ber­ry. These are ex­cit­ing times to have a Black­ber­ry.

These are very ex­cit­ing times to be launch­ing a new Black­ber­ry and in a place like Trinidad where we en­joy a com­fort­able po­si­tion as smart phone leader in the mar­ket. We are here to tell you that not on­ly do we plan to main­tain our po­si­tions as the mar­ket leader, but con­tin­ue to in­no­vate and to­geth­er with our part­ners like bmo­bile, bring the best in class mo­bile com­put­ing de­vices to mar­ket."

Ri­val tech­nol­o­gy-gi­ant Sam­sung un­veiled its Galaxy S4 at Prime Restau­rant at In­vaders Bay, Wood­brook, where Wev­er­son Cor­reia, sales man­ag­er for Sam­sung Caribbean said his com­pa­ny had the largest chunk of the lo­cal smart­phone mar­ket–40 per cent.

He hint­ed that in an ef­fort to bol­ster its po­si­tion fur­ther as the "mar­ket leader" the com­pa­ny will con­sid­er en­gag­ing its car­ri­ers, bmo­bile and Dig­i­cel, on the sub­ject of re­duc­ing the unit price on Sam­sung de­vices with the aim of in­creas­ing vol­ume and dom­i­nat­ing the mar­ket.Mar­tin said Black­ber­ry spent the last 18-24 months work­ing hard to bring the new Black­ber­ry Z10 plat­form to mar­ket.

He said with­in re­cent years, "in­tense com­pe­ti­tion, shall we say, from oth­er plat­forms sought of put us in a bind and Black­ber­ry seemed to have not paid at­ten­tion to that"."Now, over the course of the last 18 months, we have re-de­signed, re-imag­ined and re-in­vent­ed, not on­ly Black­ber­ry as a plat­form, but Black­ber­ry as a com­pa­ny. The Black­ber­ry 10 plat­form is our first ag­gres­sive, guns out ap­proach, at the mo­bile com­put­ing world and the Z10 is our first de­vice to bring that plat­form to mar­ket."

Rakesh Goswa­mi, ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent of Gov­ern­ment and En­ter­prise Ser­vices at TSTT, par­ent com­pa­ny of bmo­bile, said the com­pa­ny would be ful­ly sup­port­ing the Black­Ber­ry Z10 and Black­ber­ry En­ter­prise Ser­vice for BB10.