BlackBerry is Pentagon's weapon of choice when it comes to smartphones

BlackBerry is a happy camper after the U.S. Department of Defense said the company’s smartphones will account for 98 percent of devices in one of its new networks.   About 80,000 BlackBerry’s and 1,800 phones and tablets based on Apple’s iOS software and Google Inc.’s Android operating system will start being hooked up to the Department of Defense’s management system at the end of this month, the Defense Information Systems Agency said in a statement last week. The $16 million project, which began in 2012, aims to give users secure access to information when mobile and don’t compromise military data or corrupt defence networks when on the go.   “The new year will bring new mobile capabilities to as many as 100,000 DoD users,” Pentagon officials said in a statement. “DoD will begin deploying version 1.0 of the unclassified mobility capability Jan. 31 and will build out capacity to support up to 100,000 users by the end of the fiscal year.”   This move seemed to be imminent when BlackBerry’s new platform and devices like the BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 received the U.S. Defense Information System Agency’s approval to be used by the Department of Defense last summer.   Facing fierce competition from iOS and Android operating systems in the consumer space, the struggling smartphone maker’s CEO John Chen had already sent out a clear missive that nothing could deter **the solid support offered to its enterprise customers** . It was always on Chen’s game plan to meet up with government customers in North America and Europe in an effort to “stabilize those relationships” – **which has clearly paid off** .   Doug Pollitt, a broker at Toronto-based Pollitt & Co, tells Bloomberg Businessweek, “The report shows that Samsung Electronics, the biggest maker of Android devices, and Apple are not making the inroads into military smartphone procurement that many expected because they can’t always meet the security specifications the Pentagon wants. It’s a challenging specification and other vendors are having a tough time meeting it,” said Pollitt, whose brokerage owns shares of BlackBerry. “BlackBerry has already has got it.”