Uncle Sam is finally an Apple (AAPL) fan. The Pentagon today approved the use of iPads, iPhones and other Apple products by its soldiers, sailors and pilots.
The announcement, though expected, is less of a win for Apple than a defeat for BlackBerry. Almost 80 percent of the U.S. military’s 600,000 mobile devices are BlackBerries. That’s not actually so many: BlackBerry sold 28.1 million devices last year.
Sure, a few hundred thousand here, a few hundred thousand there, and eventually you’re talking about real money. But the bigger damage to BlackBerry may be to its reputation for a unique level of network security. Historically, it has wooed corporate and government buyers and slowed defections with the promise the most hack-proof network on the market. That fight has already been largely lost at the corporate level; when the the Department of Defense is cool with the competition, it’s hard for an IT guy to argue. Meanwhile, Samsung devices running Google’s Android operating system got the green light from the Defense Department early this month.
Specifically, the Apple approval lets government workers access military networks via iOS 6, though Apple’s been making inroads at the Pentagon for a while. Some defense agencies already use Apple devices — about 41,000 devices in all — but to date, they’ve been required to crunch data through a third-party in order to comply with federal safety requirements. About a year ago, the Air Force awared a $9.4 million contract to buy as many as 18,000 iPads, one of the military’s largest tablet buys to date. Air Force pilots used the devices to replace bags full of manuals and navigation charts.
