The Canadian tech company announced that its BBM has been beefed up as a focus is placed on software.
The tech company from Windsor, Canada may be struggling when it comes to hardware, but it is using its popular BlackBerry Messenger program and other software to help to bring itself back into relevance and profitability.
The company has announced that it has beefed up its free BBM application for all smartphone operating systems.
There are several new features that have been added to the BlackBerry Messenger app, many of which will be quite appealing to the current and future users of the mobile application. Among the most appealing could be one that allows a user to “retract” a message that was sent to a recipient in error. This option also allows a user to set a time limit on the existence of a message that has been sent.
The BlackBerry Messenger update also provides new location reporting tools that gives users a greater options range.
For instance, the new BBM features make it possible for users to be able to decide whether or not they would like to publicly reveal their physical location. They can decide that they do or do not want to share this data and, if they do, they can state exactly how long they wish to continue to do so.
Until very recently, most of those features did actually exist in the BBM mobile app, but they were available only when using the premium version of the application, for which people paid an annual $12 subscription fee. That said, now that social messaging competition is headed skyward, BlackBerry has opened up these features to users of the free mobile app.
According to the BlackBerry senior vice president of BBM, Matthew Talbot, “Building on the renowned immediacy, reliability and security inherent to BBM, the new release provides unmatched level of privacy and control to BBM users without any subscription fees.”
Talbot also went on to say that providing control over the BlackBerry Messenger content and messages shared by users can ensure that those individuals can be confident in the control they have over that information.
BlackBerry has involved itself in the mobile commerce space in the past, but has found limited success in doing so. BBM Money was one of the first mobile payments service from the company, which allowed users to send funds to others. They could also use this service to send people pre-paid mobile credit, which could be used for a variety of purposes. BlackBerry has not found the same success in mobile commerce as other companies, such as PayPal and Google.