On Thursday, however, RIM may have notched a small victory in its quest to keep BlackBerries as the preferred smartphone of federal agencies. The Immigrations and Custom Enforcement agency (ICE) has announced that it will begin a pilot program to test RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 (BB 10) mobile operating system along with the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10) starting in January 2013.
ICE will be among the first government agencies to test BlackBerry 10, but the timing of the announcement is a little odd. Just two months ago ICE announced that it would let its employees use iPhones instead of BlackBerries. In all, about 17,000 ICE employees were being switched away from aging BlackBerries to Apple devices.
“Our priority is to ensure that ICE and all government agencies understand the full capabilities of the new BlackBerry 10 platform and how it can help them meet their mobility needs today and in the future. We are confident that they will be impressed by what they see and how BlackBerry 10 can help them develop new opportunities, improve service delivery and fully leverage the potential of mobile communications. We look forward to continuing our long-standing relationship with ICE and other global government organizations,” said Scott Totzke, senior vice president, BlackBerry Security, at RIM in an emailed statement to ReadWrite.
BB 10 I FIPS Certified
One big chip that RIM has in its pocket for BB 10 is that the operating system already has FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standards) certification well ahead of its January 30th launch. RIM announced the FIPS certification in a surprise announcement in November. Normally, FIPS certification comes for an operating system or a device four to six months after the device is released as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) takes time to work through its queue of devices seeking approval to be used in the federal government. The fact that RIM already has FIPS 140-2 certification suggests that the company has had a close-to-consumer ready version of BlackBerry 10 working since at least the middle of 2012.
The pilot program by ICE and other government agencies could well end up being very important for the future of RIM and the success of BlackBerry 10. Many large enterprises and top government contractors look towards what the federal government is doing to secure its mobile devices when making decisions on what devices they will roll out to their employees. While there are several enterprise-grade security certifications, FIPS is seen as a standard-bearer in mobile security.
引言CB看到的~這也是我的疑問 "Posted by Qaxl Tuesday, Feb 05, 2013 1 hrs ago I ask the same question: "why disguise it when the Q10 has been revealed?" why not simply give out Q10s ? surely it must cost extra to make different hardware for the same device esp since the quantities are going to be limited, and in the end they will sort of "self destruct"