Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, and they have expanded from what was originally planned to be just an online bookseller to become a multinational e-commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has done very well with their own line of consumer electronics which include the globally popular Kindle e-books and tablets. But Amazon is also well known for its wireless store, which recently saw the new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone discounted down to $99 on contract for both the Verizon and AT&T networks in the US.
The handset had been rumored to launch at somewhere between $149 and $199 when it debuted the new BlackBerry form factor and BlackBerry 10 operating system. The discounted retail price from Amazon may be partly responsible for the more than 1 million BlackBerry Z10 smartphones which have sold so far. Industry analysts expected the revamped BlackBerry handset to sell approximately 900,000 units as of the beginning of this week, and the Z10 has tabulated well over 1 million retail sales thus far.
A record breaking 1 million unit order was also placed in the commercial marketplace, and it seems that the BlackBerry (formerly RIM) gamble on the newly styled BlackBerry Z10 smartphone is paying off already. The company had been the king of the mobile marketplace as far as smartphones go as recently as 2007. That was when the Apple iPhone burst onto the consumer electronics scene delivering what was then a large display at 3.5 inches, and the iconic thin, rectangular slab design with touchscreen driven interface which is familiar to most Android and iOS operated phones today.
BlackBerry stubbornly stuck by the physical QWERTY keyboard design for their handsets, and slowly but surely began losing market share. The Apple iOS and Android operating systems now dominantly own the vast majority of market share in the smartphone marketplace, and BlackBerry hopes that their new multitasking BlackBerry 10 operating system and touchscreen driven BlackBerry Z10 will help them once again become a premier player in the smartphone arena.
The new BlackBerry Z10 showcases a large 4.2 inch display with 1,280 x 768 pixel resolution and double the typical amount of RAM memory found on a smartphone. That 2.0 GB of RAM joins a whopping 32 GB of internal memory and a microSD slot in the handset’s hardware package. The phone is powered by a speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 dual core chip and was debuted at a special BlackBerry event on January 30 of this year in New York City. Verizon Wireless claims the largest 4G LTE network in the United States, with over 440 markets, while AT&T claims the most wireless subscribers in the US.
