BlackBerry’s BBM roll-out re-ignites

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

Get going quick if you signed up at BBM.com previously

bbm on CAT B15 android phone

Oh, the power of the Press. The next working day after our Open to letter to BlackBerry’s Bocking, the company re-commenced its roll out of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) for Android and iPhone. The good news is that if you had signed up on the BBM.com site (and apparently six million of us did), then you can get up and going now with BlackBerry’s industry leading IM [Instant Messaging] service. Significantly, BlackBerry appears to have been closely co-operating with Samsung Africa on this because non-Samsung African users will have to wait three days for BBM to appear on Play. That’s because it is going to be exclusively available via the Samsung App Store.

Writing on the InsideBlackBerry blog here,  Andrew Bocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry revealed that in addition to the one million Android users who downloaded a pre-release version of BBM for Android, another million managed to ‘side-load’  it onto their iPhones as well.

If BlackBerry really is going to build an industry leading social network, it will have to start working closely with the other handset vendors – and obviously it has already started with the market leader – Samsung.

Anyway, GoMo News is now up and running with the Android version of BBM on our loan CAT B15 handset – mainly because we were in the first six million to sign up on BBM.com.

Indeed, rather than messing around with looking on Google Play or the iTunes store, GoMo would recommend you go straight to bbm.com and it will connect you.

There’s more good news in that you should be able to sign into BBM on your Android or your iPhone using your BlackBerry ID.

That ID is the email address and password you used to sign into the BlackBerry World app store.

Unfortunately, given that we test so many handsets, BBM found the wrong profile for us. We’ll have to work on sorting that out.

Sub-Sahara African readers with Samsungs  get BBM here.

If you want to know more about what BBM for Android and Iphone provides, or help with downloading the app, read the full Press Release here.

  Tony is currently Editor of GoMobile News. He's a veteran telecoms journalist who has previously worked for major printed and online titles. Follow him on Twitter @GoMoTweet.