Mall of America in Favor of the Nokia Lumia 920 Over BlackBerry

This can count as yet another strike against BlackBerry. If you are keeping count, this would be the third strike. On February 11, 2013, Home Depot announced that it was dropping BlackBerry in favor of the iPhone. On February 15, New Zealand made the same decision. Now it seems that the Mall of America is also following suit. Although, they are making one change in the scenario, they are switching to Nokia Lumia 920 smartphones.

This trend has to be weighing heavily on BlackBerry. It clearly shows that the company is having a hard time hanging onto its business customers. That is essentially all it has left. With very little consumer interest at the moment, BlackBerry is trying as hard as it can to hold onto the enterprise sector, unfortunately, it is having a dreadfully hard time.

The Mall of America opened its doors on August 11, 1992. It is owned by the Triple Five Group. The group is owned by the Ghemezian brothers of Canada. The Mall, as it became known, is the second largest shopping mall in total area, and the largest in terms of the total number of store vendors in the U.S. The Mall employs an average of between 11,000-12,000 workers annually with a couple of thousand more during the holidays.

If you are old enough, you will remember that Nokia is a Swedish maker of mobile phones. I have had a cell phone since 1998. It was a very large Motorola flip phone and the coolest thing that I had. The second (and third) cell phone that I owned was a Nokia. At one point, they were head to head with Motorola as the two brands of cell phones to own. Moving forward 15 years, Nokia dropped off the top 20 list.

Now it appears that their alliance with Microsoft is starting to bring their name back to people’s lips. The Lumia was Nokia’s jump back into the smartphone business.  Combining it with Microsoft Enterprise Services is another boost. Since February 2011, Nokia has had a strategic partnership with Microsoft. At that time, all Nokia smartphones incorporated Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system which replaced Symbian as Nokia’s OS. Nokia unveiled its first Windows Phone handsets, the Lumia 710 and 800, in October 2011. The Lumia 920 uses Windows Phone 8 as its OS.

On January 9, 2013, Nokia signed a deal with business technology and managed services provider Avanade. The deal will see the company create and deliver Nokia Lumia devices, along with supported applications and services to large enterprise customers. It would appear that they are doing a good job.

A representative for Avanade said, "Avanade and Nokia plan to deliver packaged offerings combining Avanade's application development and system integration services, Microsoft technology and Nokia's Lumia products and related services. By using Microsoft's technology with Nokia's Lumia handsets, which run the latest Windows Phone 8 platform, it offers a tight ecosystem of apps and services that work seamlessly together.”