BlackBerry
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BlackBerry is a Canadian company that before 2013 was known as RIM (Research In Motion). The company was founded in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis, among others, who led it along with Jim Balsillie until 2012 and took the company to great heights. Like many other telecom manufacturers, it failed to adapt quickly enough to changing market conditions and nearly went under.
BlackBerry history
In its early years, RIM mainly developed business communications products such as modems and payment terminals. The first consumer products did not come until 1995 with a modem plug-in card for laptops and the 1996 Inter@ctive Pager. That pager in particular proved to be a hit because it could send and receive short messages. The pagers were immediately equipped with a full keyboard and thus differed from the traditional pagers that could only receive messages.
In 1999, RIM announced its first BlackBerry product; the BlackBerry 850. The device was capable of receiving emails from a Microsoft Exchange Server thanks to its in-house developed BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server). The first phone became the BlackBerry 957 from April 2000. This ran BlackBerry OS and relied heavily on BES for receiving business e-mails. Many more phones and phone series would follow that mostly shared the same philosophy.
The first problems surfaced in 2011. The rise of Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Windows Mobile had not led to updates such as improved touchscreen support. And as iOS and Windows Mobile also gained support for business applications such as Exchange, customers began to switch. The company said goodbye to its founders and moved to BlackBerry 10 which was based on a new operating system; QNX. Meanwhile, phones were becoming more powerful and energy efficient, making services such as BES and BIS unnecessary. The revenue stream dried up and in 2013 BlackBerry put itself up for sale.
A sale was eventually abandoned but major layoffs were inevitable. In 2013, John Chen was appointed to put things in order. One of the changes became that BlackBerry would no longer make phones itself. Today, it leaves that to others including TCL, Merah Putih and Optiemus Infracom. These are allowed to market phones under the BlackBerry name. This new strategy is bearing fruit; the company is now writing black figures again.
BlackBerry series
The current product range of BlackBerry phones is many times smaller than it once was. Back then, the company frequently released models in the Bold, Curve and Pearl series. New models are also no longer released in the Q and Z series that run under the QNX platform. Today we have the following series;
- DTEK - Consumer phones with large touchscreen
- KEY - Business phones with full keyboard
Abroad, especially in India and Indonesia, BlackBerry is still fairly popular. That is where you will find the Evolve series made by Optiemus. However, these entry-level phones are not released worldwide, which is why you won't find them here.
Porsche design
BlackBerry has long had a partnership with Porsche's design studio. This resulted in a number of Porsche design versions of existing BlackBerry models. In terms of appearance, these differed by using clean lines and premium materials. An extremely expensive price tag was the result. With the decline of BlackBerry's popularity, the Porsche collaboration also came to an end. Meanwhile, the automaker makes special phone versions for Huawei.
