BlackBerry this week announced that one of its established partners has placed an order for one million BlackBerry 10 operating system-based smartphones, with shipments starting immediately. This order marks the largest ever single purchase order in BlackBerry's history.

“An order for one million devices is a tremendous vote of confidence in BlackBerry 10. Consumers are ready for a new user experience, and BlackBerry 10 delivers. With strong partner support, coupled with this truly re-invented new platform, we have a powerful recipe for success,” said Rick Costanzo, executive vice president of global sales, BlackBerry.

BlackBerry did not name the partner who bought one million of devices, but considering the fact that there are not a lot of employers with around one million (or more) of employees who might need security provided by BlackBerry, this could be either a large network operator or a government agency, such as the U.S. Department of Defense, National Health Service or something like that.

BlackBerry unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones in late January, 2013. BlackBerry Z10 is now available for purchase in a number of markets around the world and will be available in the United States starting this month.

BlackBerry Z10 features 4.2” multi-touch display with 1280*768 resolution (356 pixels per inch), Blackberry Q10 with QWERTY keyboard has 3.1” display with 720*720 resolution.

The BlackBerry 10 smartphones are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 system-on-chip [dual-core Krait 1.50GHz cores with 1MB L2 cache, Adreno 225 graphics, dual-channel LPDDR2 memory controller, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, global 4G/LTE, HSPA+ and so on], 2GB of LPDDR2 memory, 16GB of NAND flash internal storage, 8MP cameras and an expandable memory card slot. Both feature a micro HDMI out port for presentations, and advanced sensors such NFC (near field communications) to support mobile payments and the exchange of information with a tap of the smartphone. They also have a removable battery.

The BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones will each come in white and black. Versions of BB10 smartphones sold outside the U.S. and Canada will feature Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 application processors with two ARM Cortex A9 and two ARM Cortex-M3 cores as well as PowerVR SGX544 3D graphics and Vivante 2D graphics engines.

Tags: Blackberry, RIM, BlackBerry 10, BB10, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, OMAP, Snapdragon