Late last week we brought you news that energy giant Halliburton was dropping its support for the BlackBerry platform in favor of Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Now it seems that the beleaguered RIM is about to suffer another blow. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is going to be dropping support for BlackBerry as well.
According to an internal NOAA memo obtained by The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, BlackBerry will officially be struck from the rolls of NOAA’s supported mobile devices on May 12 of this year. Joseph Klimavicz, NOAA’s Chief Information Officer said that new employees will begin receiving the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2, each running iOS 5 or higher. There is no word on whether employees will be allowed to supply their own devices.
This is another blow to RIM, which has been practically hemorrhaging market share to Android and iOS over the past several years. While BlackBerry once owned the mobile enterprise market, they have never managed to properly respond to the threat posed by the extremely popular iOS and Android devices.