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Cape Town - South Africans stand to win their share of R1m for using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).
On Monday, BlackBerry announced a contest dubbed The Great South African BBM Recruitment Contest that would see people winning R1 000 each in airtime for expanding their BBM contact list.
The competition runs until April 30 and is open to all BBM users, regardless of what platform they are using.
If you are already on BBM, you must have a minimum of 10 contacts and regularly chat on BBM. This is ostensibly designed to limit fake accounts being used to skew the contest.
BlackBerry says that the top 1 000 people who are the most active on BBM by the end of the contest will each win R1 000 in airtime paid into their prepaid account.
The Canadian-based company once dominated the smartphone market before the arrival of the iPhone and Android-based devices.
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However, despite dire predictions from industry experts who wrote the company off, BlackBerry is on course to return to profit after years of losses and the company has had a relentless pace of hardware releases.
Many South Africans still happily use BlackBerry devices and the company is working hard to convince them to upgrade its latest devices and the BlackBerry 10 operating system.
The Z3, Passport and Classic were released in 2014 and are designed to capture BlackBerry's traditional business market.
The firm has also touted its security as superior to that of rivals.
"The BlackBerry Z3 smartphone gives users more ways to securely communicate and collaborate and extends the BlackBerry 10 platform experience to a new generation of South African customers at an attractive price point," said Yudi Moodley, managing director at BlackBerry for Africa of the low-cost touch screen device.
BlackBerry has also moved to exploit the growing popularity of Android devices.
The latest version of the BlackBerry 10 software is able to play Android applications, through there are some limitations in specific apps that require plug-ins to Google Maps, for example.
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