When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, there were two habits he couldn’t kick: cigarettes and his BlackBerry.
Obama quit smoking long ago — and now it looks like he’s getting ready to ditch the BlackBerry, too.
The White House is testing LG Electronics and Samsung phones “for internal use,” according to a report this week.
The tests, being conducted by the White House’s technology team and the White House Communications Agency, which are in charge of the President’s communications, are in early stages, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal.
Still, news of the tests has industry watchers speculating what a switch will mean for the Canadian company that makes BlackBerry, which is struggling from plummeting sales as consumers move to touch screen devices, like Apple’s iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy.
Back in 2008, when the iPhone was little more than a year old, Obama fought tooth and nail to keep his BlackBerry.
He was allowed to carry a modified version of the phone, which has long been touted as the most secure, if not the hippest, mobile device — thanks to its encryption technology.
As recently as December, BlackBerry’s lock on markets that put security first, like the White House and the military, seemed solid.
At an event to talk about Obamacare, the president said that he is “not allowed, for security reasons, to have an iPhone.”
But BlackBerry rivals are making “inroads in security,” said Brian Blair, an analyst of mobile hardware with Wedge Partners Corp.
“The White House is looking at alternatives to BlackBerry because they don’t know if BlackBerry will be around in two to three years,” Blair said.
LG Electronics and Samsung phones both run on Google’s Android technology, suggesting that Larry Page may win out over Tim Cook in the race to have White House bragging rights.
Obama does, however, use an iPad for reading and gave the Queen of England an iPod when he visited in 2009.
If Obama ditches the BlackBerry, it won’t be the first time the US government has dissed the Canadian tech company this year.
In February, the US Air Force said it was replacing 5,000 BlackBerry devices with Apple phones.
Blackberry shares traded down 2.5 percent on Friday to close at $9.18.
The stock is up 23.4 percent this year, but it’s down a whopping 78 percent over the last five years.