Last Wednesday, BlackBerry officially pushed BB10 out into the world, with a glitzy live-streamed launch event, showing off the OSs features and not a few surprises. One of the two handsets unveiled at the event, the QWERTY-less BlackBerry Z10, is now available in shops in the UK. So hows it doing?
Rather well, according to BlackBerry UK MD Stephen Bates. Speaking at the BlackBerry Jam event in Amsterdam, Bates didnt share any figures, but said sales of the Z10 have “exceeded all of our launch partners expectations”, and the handsets were in fact selling out in certain key retail locations. Of course, its in BlackBerrys interest to paint a positive picture, but other sources have been backing this up.
Investment firm Jefferies & Co estimates sales of the Z10 to be at least several hundred thousand units in the UK over the launch weekend, with Carphone Warehouse seeing the devices selling out on a widespread basis and EE, O2 and Vodafone seeing robust demand in their stores. And its not just the UK – according to its channel checks, Jefferies & Co says the pre-orders in the United Arab Emirates and Canada have been solid so far. 
Perhaps most impressively, those pre-orders arent just coming from die-hard BlackBerry users. According to Todd Coupland, managing director at Canadian analyst CIBC, 50 per cent of Z10 preorders in Canada have come from current Android and iOS users.
