BlackBerry held the launch event for its new flagship today in three major cities around the world where it not only unveiled the BlackBerry Passport but also showed off a new service called BlackBerry Blend. During the demo of its new smartphone the company focused on BlackBerry OS 10.3, a major update for its mobile platform that comes with updates for almost all aspects of the OS. BlackBerry reiterated at the event today that existing BB10 devices will skip OS 10.3.
Back in January 2013 BlackBerry launched two BB10 devices, the Z10 and Q10, they were followed up by the Q5, Z30 and the Z3. All of these devices are powered by BB OS 10 but the company has confirmed they will skip BlackBerry OS 10.3 which comes pre-installed on the Passport.
That’s not to say that all of these devices will not be able to enjoy everything that the new software has to offer. They’ll skip this particular version alright, and will receive an update straight to BB OS 10.3.1, which will be the first incremental update for the new release.
Unfortunately that means anyone with the aforementioned devices right now will have to wait until OS 10.3.1 is released to use BlackBerry Blend. Even if a leaked version of OS 10.3 is installed on any of those devices Blend is not going to work.
BlackBerry has said that OS 10.3.1 for its existing devices will be released later this year.