The fact that they use modern communications tools to co-ordinate their activities or to disseminate news is no more remarkable than that the communards of 1871 used cobblestones to build barricades. Political revolutions are made by people putting themselves in harm's way – on the streets. The truth is that the heady talk attributing these social and political upheavals to social networking and text messaging was mostly eyewash – as, for example, the Guardian and LSE's "Reading the Riots" study of Twitter's role in the UK looting suggests. Apart altogether from the irony of seeing a device – the BlackBerry – that had once been the ultimate badge of corporate status now apparently metamorphose into a working tool for the scum of the earth, there was the fact that PIN messaging on BlackBerrys is not only an ancient technology, but was one of the reasons why governments across the world wanted BlackBerrys for their officials. Which made one wonder what planet they inhabited.
Men in suits speculated openly about whether these satanic channels should be shut down altogether. When news of Britain's outbreak of recreational looting eventually reached the more expensive parts of Tuscany and David Cameron returned to take charge of the government's response, there was a lot of loose talk about the role that Twitter, Facebook and a particularly sinister technology called BlackBerry Messenger was playing in co-ordinating the mayhem.
This lesson – about the centrality of networked communications to modern industrial life – did not, however, seem to penetrate the corridors of power in Whitehall. But then the Egyptian generals, who run a lot of businesses, discovered that they were losing millions of dollars in revenue every disconnected day, so the country hastily rejoined the networked world. Mubarak shut down Egypt's internet access for several days, which caused some disquiet. There was gleeful exhilaration when some hackers rigged up a "phone to tweet" system that enabled Egyptians to dial an international phone number and record a message that was then broadcast as a tweet. There was delight in the west when the Tunisian regime failed to grasp the significance of Facebook and Twitter, and concern when the Mubarak regime did. "What's that?" asked the baffled diplomat. He also told an instructive story about how a senior colleague was baffled when a demonstrator appeared in Tahrir Square holding up a placard that contained only a Twitter hashtag. I had a fascinating conversation with a State Department official who related how his colleagues, frustrated by the absence of al-Jazeera on US cable channels, were reduced to streaming it to their laptops. Then came the Arab spring and the agreeable discovery that social networking and mobile phones appeared to have politically useful effects. The U-turn was most painful in the US State Department, where Hillary Clinton had to eat her hat, or at any rate her stirring January 2010 speech about how " information has never been so free" and how "even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable". Western governments that had hitherto viewed modern networked-communications technology as a useful scourge of authoritarian regimes began to have second thoughts.
Since launching the platform it has introduced a high-end Z10 device, a Qwerty-equipped Q10 and announced a mid-range Q5 device with Qwerty keyboard that is yet to go on sale.The year began with the reverberations from Wikileaks – first the revelations about US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and then what American diplomats had been writing home.
While iPhone and Android device sales dominate headlines, Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform and BlackBerry 10 are currently in a battle for third spot.
The company, which only launched the most recent full version of its operating system – BlackBerry 10 – in January this year has a lot of ground to make up in the mobile space, particularly with consumers. However, critics will point out that the number of apps on the BlackBerry World app store is far lower than its rival platforms, particularly if only considering those aimed at its newer BlackBerry 10 OS and excluding direct ports from the Android OS.
The update to core apps such as this can only strengthen its case with consumers and at least reassure some that it’s committed to keeping owners of older handsets up to date, as well as its newer ones. BlackBerry’s Twitter app was first released back in 2010, but has lacked the more sophisticated features offered by native apps on other platforms and the Web client until today’s update.