After the official unveiling of BlackBerry 10 and the Z10 and Q10 smartphones yesterday, all four major U.S. carriers confirmed that they plan to offer at least one of BlackBerry's new handsets in the future. There weren't any statements on BlackBerry 10 from smaller U.S. carriers at the time, but today some of them spoke publicly about the new BlackBerry OS. Unfortunately for BlackBerry fans on those operators, there's not much in the way of good news to report right now.
U.S. Cellular spokesman Steve Carlson told FierceWireless that his company doesn't have currently have plans to offer any BlackBerry 10 products, but he did say that USCC is "still in discussions" with BlackBerry. Meanwhile, MetroPCS spokesman Drew Crowell said that while he had nothing to announce about Metro's BlackBerry 10 plans, his carrier is "looking" at the BlackBerry 10 handsets and will determine whether or not they're "a fit" for MetroPCS and its subscribers. Spokespeople from Cricket Wireless and C Spire Wireless said that they had no comment on BlackBerry 10 support.
It's worth noting that just because there smaller carriers have no announcements to make about BlackBerry 10 now doesn't mean that they won't support the platform in the future. All four of the carriers in today's report currently sell older BlackBerry smartphones on their websites, and as FierceWireless notes, major new hardware typically hits the large U.S. operators first and then makes its way to the smaller carriers later on. So far the only information we've got on the BlackBerry Z10's U.S. launch is that it's expected to begin arriving in mid-March, so if BB10 does eventually appear on the smaller carriers, those customers may be in for a bit of a wait. How many of you are on U.S. Cellular, Cricket, C Spire or MetroPCS and would be interested in buying a BlackBerry 10 device if one hit your carrier of choice?
Via FierceWireless
