BlackBerry offers up to $600 if you trade in your iPhone
You can now get up to $600 if you trade in your iPhone to switch to a BlackBerry Passport. , lasting from Monday to Feb. 15, allows iPhone users to trade in their iPhone (from the 4S model onward) for up to $400 with an additional $200 topped up from BlackBerry.
The deal conditions are simple: Buy a BlackBerry Passport from BlackBerry directly or from Amazon, and once you send in a box label and order confirmation to BlackBerry, they鈥檒l send you a prepaid Visa in the mail six weeks later. The amount you鈥檒l be paid will mainly be determined by the make and condition of the iPhone, pending company inspection.
The Passport, a square smart phone with a 4.5-inch touchscreen display and keyboard, was released on Sept. 24 to a market that鈥檚 exceedingly skeptical of BlackBerry鈥檚 survival as a hardware seller.
This isn鈥檛 the first time that smart phone sellers have offered cash incentives to gain a customer base. T-Mobile with similar offerings. The company will pay for your termination fee and your old phone in exchange for a phone and contract on its networks, though it won鈥檛 limit your choice of phone in the way BlackBerry will. Competing carriers 鈥� AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon 鈥� offer similar trade-in programs, but they only pay out in gift cards limited to their own networks.
While BlackBerry鈥檚 offer might just be enough to recoup some of the costs of buying the phone, this last-ditch effort to get people to switch might be too little too late to save it from severely shrinking. BlackBerry鈥檚 market share has plummeted consistently throughout the past two years. The company is capturing less than 1 percent of the market share in the United States, with 0.5 percent worldwide market share, .
The company鈥檚 recent efforts to reshuffle its market offerings weren鈥檛 met with open arms. The IDC reports that the company鈥檚 BB7 operating system still outpaced BB10 even though the new system has聽 since the report was released. What does this mean? Either users are buying older phones, or current users aren鈥檛 upgrading. And no new purchases means no new profit for the company.
The BlackBerry still has a few loyal customers 鈥� the President Obama聽being one of the most prominent, because the phone鈥檚 security is so hard to crack.
BlackBerry still enjoys some prominence in South Africa. from the South African Broadcasting Corporation, 37.9 percent of South Africans own BlackBerries as their Internet browsing device. The report also shows, however, that owners will prefer their next phone to be a Samsung, Apple, or even Nokia phone compared to a BlackBerry.
Overall, the market looks dismal for the BlackBerry Passport. While this trade-in program might just be right for a market niche looking to trade in an iPhone, it鈥檚 safe to say the company won鈥檛 capture minds and wallets like it may have years before.
