T-Mobile has buried the hatchet with BlackBerry after a feud between the two companies that lasted more than a year. The Bellevue-based carrier announced today that its customers will be able to purchase the BlackBerry Classic.
The device will be available for purchase for $0 down, with a monthly payment of $18.33 for 24 months, beginning on May 15. It’s fairly unique among smartphones not only because it’s made by BlackBerry, but also because it sports a physical keyboard, which is a rarity among smartphones these days.
It’s good news for BlackBerry, which continues to lose market share to its competitors, despite its previously dominant role in the smartphone market. The company has been trying hard to pick up new users, even as its share of the U.S. market dropped to below that of Windows Phone, which isn’t particularly popular. T-Mobile may also see a boost among enterprise customers, who remain one of the largest audiences for BlackBerry handsets because of their security and device management features.
Today’s news comes more than a year after the two companies got into a very public spat over a promotion that encouraged BlackBerry owners to trade in their old phone for a newer device that wasn’t made by BlackBerry. At the time, BlackBerry CEO John Chen was “outraged” over the promotion. T-Mobile fired back by offering BlackBerry users even deeper bonuses for trading in their old phone, which then led Chen to pull his company’s hardware from T-Mobile altogether.
