Barack Obama has been known to have a soft spot for his bulky secure BlackBerry, even before he became the President of the United States. Lucky for him, he confessed on Wednesday that he wasn't allowed to have an iPhone due to security reasons.
"I'm not allowed for security reasons to have an iPhone," Obama said to a group of young people at an event promoting his health care law at the White House, Agence France-Presse reported.
However, he said that his daughters Sasha and Malia spend a lot of time on their iPhones.
Even though the BlackBerry has long been losing market share to other smart phones including those manufactured by Apple, the device has managed to still be popular in official Washington owing value to its strong security encryption, according to AFP.
After his inauguration as President in 2009, Obama fought to keep his BlackBerry despite Secret Service raising concerns of the vulnerability of being hacked, giving away his whereabouts and amid worries that anything he writes could eventually be grist for congressional investigations, CNET reported.
"I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry," he said during an interview with CNBC. "They're going to pry it out of my hands."
Recently, Obama's specially adapted BlackBerry came under scrutiny amidst assertions that U.S. spies eavesdropped on the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a statement, the White House said it assured Merkel that no active monitoring was occurring, CNET reported.
Despite not indulging on what "security reasons" hold back the President from using an iPhone, some have theorized that a smartphone provide an easier access to a person's real-time physical location, according to CNET.
The President has often cited the BlackBerry as a way to escape the confinement of the White House "bubble" which often makes it difficult to communicate with normal people or to get information from the outside world that is not filtered for him by aides or the press.
