Department of Defense to Replace BlackBerry with iPhone

By Paul Thomson :: 9:37 PM

The U.S. Department of Defense is all but set to dump the BlackBerry as its smartphone of choice and move to Apple’s iPhone, sources close to the Pentagon tell several news outlets.

Those involved believe that the government is about to order roughly 650,000 Apple mobile devices to replace the fleet of BlackBerry phones currently in use across military units. The tally is thought to be 210,000 iPhones, 200,000 iPods, 120,000 iPads and 100,000 iPad minis – all replacing various BlackBerry devices that had been used for years.

This is the second recent blow today to BlackBerry from a government entity. Earlier in the day, a UK news outlet reported that BlackBerry’s new flagship handset, the Z10, was not secure enough for use by the British government.

The UK government’s Communications and Electronics Security Group apparently rejected the Z10 because the operating system had failed security requirements and tests that earlier versions of the BlackBerry operating system had passed. Sources close to the UK reviewers claim that the issues were related to the BlackBerry Balance feature, software that separates the phone into a “work” and “personal” set of zones.