I have been to Africa. Its quite big. Most people have the regular nokia phones. But there are still a large number of people (tens of millions) with smartphones. And the most popular smartphone appears to be the blackberry. It completely dominates. Maybe because the networks bias their dataplans towards the blackberry and maybe the messaging, I don't know. And there is peer pressure. My android phone was looked at with scorn and there were many helpful suggestions to switch to the blackberry to which I had to constantly explain that I was happy with my phone. The android tablets fare better though.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Could it be Blackberry is popular because of the free "ping" service? At least that is what seems to drive the mass adoption of them (and the peer pressure) among teenagers here in the Netherlands: the free unlimited "texting" with other Blackberry users.

When I asked - from the reasons I could pick up - the best I can figure is it's essentially due to network effects:

* they said blackberry was smart - they had the most active presence and support locally out of the smartphone groups

* the pin service of course

* the dataplans are most sane on blackberries and for a while the network operators only offered a dataplan to blackberries

* They just plain think they are cool. Even in England among the urban youth and erm hip hop crowd blackberries are most dominant.

It certainly was a revelation amongst many of how much of a world there is out there and how much it can differ.