[gaius]

Not if they charge a fiver or a tenner a month for it. It could be a goldmine. Remember that BB-anything works by a connection back to a RIM datacentre. That's how they did push before anyone else. It's why a BB device refers to itself as a "handheld", it's only a terminal onto BlackBerry backend services, you need the whole package.

[stevefarnworth]

Fair point, and I suppose that IMaaS is going to have a good profit margin, but the sheer numbers of people I know who have bought a BlackBerry handset because of BBM probably wouldn't have had it been available cross-platform.

[unexpected]

What's the average profit margin on a phone? $100-$150? Now imagine you bought a $10/month service - over the life of a contract, that's $240? 30% to apple - that's $168 - that's would be about breakeven - not including R&D costs, etc.