The BlackBerry Z10 has finally arrived. The much anticipated, long-delayed smartphone from the former RIM, now BlackBerry became available in the US today from AT&T. The product has been available for a number of weeks in Britain, and had some success there. The US market however is considered the most critical high-end smartphone market and its success here is of the utmost importance to the fortunes of the struggling company. The US is coincidentally where BlackBerry stands the greatest challenge, having lost the most market share in its precipitous decline down to low single-digit market share percentage.

While there are fans and detractors alike, the anticipation of how BlackBerry executes as well as how the buying public will respond couldn’t be any greater. To little surprise, there are no reports of Apple-like media and buyer frenzies and lines built up to buy the product, at least that I’ve seen. We may however see a healthy and consistent wave of buyers come around over a number of weeks and months to come. That would be a suitably successful scenario for BlackBerry. The alternative of course would be dismal sales and an outright void of any strong sales numbers. It would not take long for these reports to come out. I fully expect a mixed bag of strengths, marketing efforts, tweaks and reports of weaknesses over the next few weeks. No one said this would be easy for BlackBerry and they’re going to have to react appropriately and swiftly, gather information, focus, and work with partners to give the device a chance.

One thing BlackBerry is counting on is the enterprise play. In the past they have of course enjoyed what was at one time a virtual monopoly on the enterprise smartphone market. This was one of the things that slipped from them with the emergence of Android and Apple platforms and the capabilities they had to integrate with the enterprise. The military was one of these massive clients. I had the privilege at one time of being central to the team that architected top level military email infrastructure. BlackBerry was still a significant piece of any email architecture plan at the time, yet we encountered a bunch of obstacles in acquiring pertinent technical information from RIM as they were switching generations, documentation and a number of other issues. Information transaction issues cannot stand if they desire to capture market in these spaces and I’m sure BlackBerry is addressing these and firing on all cylinders possible with their new products all the way across the line.

BlackBerry seemingly took a couple of blows this week, only to rebound. Earlier in the week there was a report that the UK’s Communications-Electronics Security Group has rejected the BlackBerry’s new BB10 software as not secure enough for essential government work. That was quickly refuted by BlackBerry and the UK government. Later in the week it was reported that the DoD had decided to move away from BlackBerry and had decided to go with iPhones and iPads as their standard platform, replacing the nearly half a million BlackBerry devices actively in use. The Pentagon actually put out a statement denying this report rather quickly, but gave no forecast on the future makeup of their mobile device standards. So we have a bunch of conflicting reports and it’s important for BlackBerry’s fortunes that they respond as they have been to news like this that emerges from all over the place. BlackBerry is betting huge on enterprise and that frames the stakes on this play. Like the saying goes – good news travels, bad news travels faster – it’s even worse when the bad news isn’t even true at all, at least for the moment.