Yesterday, Sprint officially announced that it will be offering Samsung’s much-anticipated flagship smartphone of 2013, the Galaxy Note III, together with its companion device, the Galaxy Gear smartwatch from Friday, October 4.

BlackBerry is a great company with great products and great ideas. But BlackBerry is failing hard. And the reason is that BlackBerry’s model is obsolete.

Don’t look now, but it’s 2013. If your handset isn’t running iOS or Android, you will not succeed in the consumer smartphone market.

And succeeding is exactly what isn’t happening at BlackBerry. The company recently announced a quarterly loss of about $1 billion. They announced that 40% of BlackBerry employees will be laid off. They’ve put the company up for sale. They’re selling their jet.

It’s over, basically. But it doesn’t have to be.

What BlackBerry really needs is to become an Android-handset maker.

BlackBerry attempted to roll out its much-anticipated BBM app for both Android and iOS on Saturday, and whilst the iPhone app made its way to New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, India and the UAE, Android’s version failed to even get uploaded to the Play Store servers.

BBM for Android and iOS is now officially available to download from the App Store and Google Play. It’s the first time in its history that the popular messaging service has been brought to a third-party platform — but with services like WhatsApp and Viber already dominating cross-platform chat, is it too late?

Following Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T’s lead, Sprint has today announced its own annual upgrade plan, allowing subscribers to upgrade their handsets every 12 months, so they too can keep up to date with the latest and greatest smartphones on the market.