BlackBerry Won’t Launch BB10 Devices In Japan

BlackBerry may have been much of the past few months criss-crossing the globe in an effort to drum up developer support for BlackBerry 10, but it turns out that there’s at least one market where the company has essentially given up. According to a recent report from the Nikkei Business Daily, the Waterloo-based company would not bring BlackBerry 10 and the devices that run it to Japan’s shores, and BlackBerry has just confirmed its stance.

That’s not to say that RIM is pulling out of the country entirely - Nikkei’s report goes on to note that while BlackBerry doesn’t plan to push any new hardware like the Z10 or Q10 into Japan, it will continue to support what few existing models are still in use there. At least part of BlackBerry’s decision to keep BlackBerry 10 out of Japan was driven by sheer practicality - the process of translating all of the OS’s text into Japanese apparently presented BlackBerry with enough of a headache that it just decided to give up altogether.