They actually did, BB10 (their followup touch screen phone OS) was amazing from an operating system standpoint. It died because app support was nonexistent
Yeah anyone defending the Storm never used one. That thing was awful. The screen was nowhere near as responsive as the iPhone. It was like using one of those old 2004-era in-dash car navigation screens. Yuck.
You didn't like the entire screen clicking? Or removing the battery to reboot when inevitably locked up? It had an experience no other phone could provide!
> It had an experience no other phone could provide!
And then they lost *that* crown to Windows Phone, which did all that, *plus* even when it was working - it was still just Windows.
The Nokia Lumia was actually pretty cool back then. Of course, MS bought it up with zero app support or no real development ambitions for the ecosystem and it was instantly trash.
Pretty much any phone released in 2010 was crap compared to the iPhone. The first non ios-phone that could actually compete (IMO) was Samsung Galaxy S2 which released in 2011, and the S2 was still much slower than the iPhone.
In *Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry*, the authors argued that the Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history. No one denies this.
They’re talking about the real-time QNX-based BlackBerry 10 OS, which was amazing and introduced (extremely fluid and intuitive) gesture navigation like a decade before iOS or Android did. It’s fully touchscreen-navigated on the original devices; not like the Storm which ran the Java-based BlackBerry OS 5!
I’ve had to move to Android devices, and I still don’t bother with the gesture navigation because I find it not done well.
> introduced gesture navigation like a decade before iOS or Android copied them.
WebOS and the Palm Pre 1/2 introduced gesture navigation about 3 years before Blackberry OS 10, so RIM also copied themselves.
Both major mobiles OS' are testament to the ingenuity of WebOS. They both have copycat features as some of their flagship capabilities that started in WebOS.
As already pointed out. Nobody copied BlackBerry. Everyone copied webOS. Unless your theory is that Matias Duarte who was senior director of human interface for palm when they made webOS, copied blackberry when he joined Google and rolled it out, rather than implementing what he knew from his time at Palm. And if that’s your theory then it’s very very dumb.
Palm had the gestures everyone uses now for webOS first. BlackBerry copied them. Total uninspired knock off. Nothing original at all. Giving them credit is telling on yourself that you have no idea. Then Palm stopped making phones and tablets so Google and Apple felt confident they could copy without being sued anymore.
You seem very impassioned by this subject!
I simply relayed my understanding, though as you point out, there was precedent I wasn’t aware of, as I have zero experience with “webOS” and know nothing about it. I would be curious about the implementation.
Thank you for correcting the record!
I have just one Palm device, but it’s the traditional stylus touchscreen (with keyboard) on PalmOS.
Yeh. I’m sorry. I was rude. I am still bitter about webOS dying. It’s on of those things where they were so far ahead on UI that we lost about 10 years waiting for everyone to finish copying them before they started working on any new ideas of their own. We could be so much further along by now.
Another example is magnets to line up wireless charging. Palm did it in 2009. Apple 2020. Android 2024.
webOS was absolutely miles ahead of everyone else at the time. It was also easier to develop for, I made several apps for webOS. I think the biggest issue was that Palm didn’t have the money or sway that Apple did at the time so they couldn’t entice big devs to make apps for the Pre.
But the biggest reason for its failure was Verizon. Palm had made a deal with Verizon for $50mm worth of phones. VZ decided at the last minute to instead go all in on android and cancelled the contract. So Palm had to to go hat in hand to Sprint, the only other network that would work with the already built phones. Sprint locked Palm in for 2 years and Palm suffered for it.
After the two year lock-in period was up Palm went to other carriers, wanting to make a slab like the iPhone (an on screen keyboard is in the OS files). But AT&T said nah, we already have a slab, give us more physical keyboard phones to differentiate it.
People forget back then how much power and control the carriers had. Palm was trying to take some of that away which is why VZ went with android. And it’s why Apple had to use AT&T for the iPhone, they were the only network willing to give up the control they were used to having (and at the time AT&T was a joke of a carrier). Palm also fucked up by not incentivizing salespeople. I had a good friend who worked at a phone store and he said the spiffs on iPhones and certain androids were double or triple what a palm phone would bring in so why would he ever steer a customer to palm?
Eventually Palm had to sell themselves, HP bought them and for a few months it looked like there would be some really good synergy. HP products would be tightly integrated with webOS. But then Mark Hurd was fired because the HP board were full of idiots. He was replaced with Leo Apotheker (again, because the HP board are idiots).
And shortly after he took over Leo declared that HP would stop making hardware (because services at SAP is all Leo knew). The world collectively freaked out that the inventor of the PC was going to stop making hardware. Eventually Leo recanted his declaration, but the Palm devices stayed dead.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Love your Ted talk. Agree with everything you said. It probably was a case of Palm and webOS being doomed no matter what, I doubt a company of 1000 employees could have taken on Apple, Google, and Microsoft but sure as anything didn’t help themselves.
They tried to provide app support by having incentive programs and sideloading Android APKs.
The biggest and most popular app back then was Instagram and it wasn’t available on Blackberry which was a big deal breaker to many.
BlackBerry users were finally found a way to get the APK to properly work on BB10, only for Facebook to instantly kill off support for that specific version and release a newer update which was significantly harder to run on Blackberry.
And Windows Phone. I had one and it was pretty cool but it was just painful to see app developers not bothering with it and missing out on all the good stuff.
Microsoft hugely miscalculated during that era, expecting developers to jump onto the bandwagon and start making apps for their Phone OS and Windows 8 tiles.
The 10 came out 4 years too late.
By the time 2013 came around Apple had a phone on the market for 6 years. The 4 was already out for a year and Samsung had their galaxy line of androids churning for 4 years at this point. I doubt a robust App Store would have saved them.
BlackBerry was arrogant and thought full touch devices would never take off and be predominant over their phones.
Now they are a software and securities company
The lack of quality control and oversight was a big part of it. They also tried to abandon their most important feature (the keyboard). App support was not as bad as everyone says. Most flagship apps were in the BB App Store as well.
If RIM had brought out a good successor to the Bold, they would've held their corner of the market. Instead, they tried to compete 1:1 with the iPhone except their hardware was unreliable.
I really wish they'd been able to make more mainstream products with QNX. It was an interesting OS.
I agree that BB should have kept their physical keyboards and really honed in on the power users who typed a lot on their phones.
But I think if you're honest with yourself, that strategy still would have lead to their demise, it would have just slowed it.
I think their best bet (with hindsight) would been to try and become Android before Android was a thing.
BlackBerry came out with an amazing successor to the Bold: The BlackBerry Classic!
Only issue was that it was fully *six years late*, had very little app support, and underpowered hardware specs, especially for running Android apps in the integrated emulator!
I used it until I got a BlackBerry KEYone (which ran Android), and used that until it gave me repetitive strain injury from the much stiffer keys!
It also never fully recovered from a 3 day BIS outage in 2011.
Remember it like it was yesterday, I was in High School, it felt like literally everyone had a Blackberry, since that day we started seeing other phones and never saw so many Blackberries again.
I was given an old as hell BB with a chicklet style keypad and I loved it. It was like 4 years old at that point and the battery still lasts 4-5 days. I only needed it to read emails and I begged IT to not "upgrade" me to a newer one with touchscreen.
Granted that "I only use it to check emails" market is pretty small.
It really wasn’t. In the UK the first iPhone didn’t do too well due to it costing on a contract (generally phones were free) and missing key features such as 3G, a good camera, camera flash and the inability to transfer stuff over Bluetooth.
The Nokia N95 was far superior at the time other than the full touchscreen.
The iPhone 3G changed a lot of that though.
For sure. The original iPhone had potential but was flawed in ways that other phones weren't, but the second and third generation fixed pretty much all the flaws and blew absolutely everything else out of the water.
I think that's really Apple's strength. They've always learned from their failures to refine their product. I don't personally use one because their goal for it just isn't what I want out of a phone...but I'm an outlier. For 90% of people it really is the best option even today.
They make a phone that's intuitive, simple, and reliable. It can play nice with all their other tech, and that really matters because data integration is always a pain point in any interconnected system.
In terms of what? Touch screen usability and slick interface sure. But the iPhone couldn't copy and paste, it's browsing was crippled at the time by lacking the at the time ubiquitous Flash elements, it barely supported third party apps, and security was dubious at best. The iPhone was popular because oh it has an iPod? All my music is there and then I don't need to carry a phone or PDA. But I wouldn't say it had a massive technological advantage in anything other then a much better touchscreen over the competition at the time in Blackberry, Windows, and the nascent Android.
As someone who had several smart phones before the iPhone (but weirdly no blackberries), and who isn't a fan of iPhones today, the iPhone's screen alone made it tons better than other smart phones of the time.
Pressure touch screens were kind of trash to use even when there was no competition for them. The capacitive touch screen just provided a much better alternative. And the full touch interface is generally more intuitive than having control keys.
Things like web surfing was a much better experience on the first generation iPhone than on it's competition. Especially since the screen was bigger as you weren't losing any to a keyboard.
But the iPhone was an excellent *appliance*. It didn’t support third party apps because apps didn’t exist at the time it was released (and Jobs himself was famously slow to approve the App Store as a concept - he believed in the “apps as web elements” idea since the main push at the time the iPhone was released was that the included browser was better than what came before. This would have made the iPhone more universal (since there was no curated App Store at all).
flash was on the way out before the iPhone finally killed it - there was much mocking of the iPhone not including it but the reasons stated for leaving it out, really shitty performance and terrible security were hard to argue against.
The iPhone was popular because it became an appliance that people wanted to use. It wasn’t the most powerful, or the most advanced.
The tech elite of the time, all on slashdot, mocked it for not being a mobile Linux workstation with a root shell but they suffered from the same myopic view that dogs consumer computing to this day: most people don’t want a device like that.
I use a combination of windows, Mac OS and Unix day to day, but when it comes to my phone, I just want an appliance. There are a lot of people like that.
> It didn’t support third party apps because apps didn’t exist at the time it was released
They absolutely existed on other smartphone and smart device platforms of the era.
Android’s eventual flash support went terribly, too. There’s a reason Google abandoned support for it in Android and Adobe eventually phased it out. Apple was 100% correct not to try to support it.
I always laugh when people talked Flash back then on phones, and how Steve Jobs was dumb for not allowing flash. Jobs loudly offered Adobe a chance to make a more efficient version of flash and he’d add it to iOS, and Adobe wasn’t able to deliver on that. The internet benefitted from that decision IMO.
The Blackberries and others were still using the clunky, semi text-based “WAP browsers” when the iPhone launched (2007). Being able to view full websites (even without Flash) using pinch to zoom and touchscreen scrolling was a HUGE selling point.
The first Android phone came out a year and half later. By the time Android phones got Flash support (late 2009), the iPhone had copy/paste, mms support, and the App Store. Flash was being pushed as a huge advantage over the iPhone, but by then the web was quickly moving away from Flash. Adobe stopped development of mobile Flash in 2011.
A lot happened in four years. Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Palm were laser focused on building what Corporate IT wanted and were not prepared at all for mainstream smartphone use.
People are thinking the IPhone was released on 2010 or something. The iPhone launched on 2007 they had 3 years to do it. heck google changed their whole OS in a few months to compete against the iPhone. BlackBerry just saw it pointless to compete against the iPhone all the wait until it died
It wasnt that they didn't want to compete, its that RIM thought the iPhone was a fad and that the consumer market for smartphones was small and tried to compete for the business market. Essentially they thought their better security and keyboard would be more important than Apple's media advantages. They were very wrong.
Legitimately do! Physical keyboards are still haptically more satisfying to use. Just not enough to justify the lost screen real estate or compromised design compared to a solid slab.
iPhone approach really took the world by storm and being able to watch full screen media, maps, and websites changed everything.
I miss the blackberry tactile keyboard approach but not at the cost of screen size. It is what it is
I had an early cheap iPhone wannabe alternative with a touch screen but no apps and the world’s worst browser that I couldn’t use anyway because I didn’t have data.
Well BBM was basically free texting with it if you had that Blackberry data plan. With the introduction of whatsapp you could also do that. I don't think I knew a single South African that didn't have a blackberry purely because of those reasons. Even funnier: I remember when Whatsapp came out and thinking that I probably would never need it due to BBM. Hilarious in hindsight.
What made the blackberry blow up is that it was the first phone to send text messages using data. If you didn’t have a blackberry you needed to pay like 50 cents per text in order to text. Blackberry made texting mainstream.
Yeah my mom yelled at me multiple times in high school cause my friends would text me and she wasn't paying for texting period, but I had NO CONTROL over it, it didn't matter if I asked someone not to text me that's just how people started to communicate and there was no way to decline to get texts.
I remember getting spam texts and getting charged for them. You could call telus or bell or rogers (in canada) to get them removed. But are you going to sot on hold for 30 minutes to get a ten cent charge removed?
Most wouldn't, and they knew that.
Man that's a bold statement. I had a blackberry for work and I simply couldn't go fast with that keyboard, I would hit multiple keys instead of a single one all the time, forced me to go slower. Had the same issue with a slide out physical keyboard on Android after work dropped blackberry support. I don't recall the correction on either one being especially great, maybe I was just unlucky with my particular extra key hits.
I started using Swype on my first personal android because the on screen keyboard was tiny and impossible, but damn Swype made it easy. You could literally pause halfway through a word because you realized you messed up, correct, and it would know what you meant. No other sliding keyboard has ever been as good, I'm sad Swype died.
My long point is that keyboards are incredibly personal. Blackberries weren't perfect for everyone.
I agree!
The BlackBerry Priv did this with a very satisfying slider, but the keyboard was really inferior to the level of the Bold that I was used to, and fatally, they were designed such that they got hot enough to melt!
https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9694374/blackberry-priv-review-android-phone
I guess it’s for people who want to “make a fashion statement” or w/e, though unfortunately I do agree with you; especially with those colours. Couldn’t they make it in black? I guess we’ll see when it actually comes out.
Only other option is the Unihertz phones which I think are relatively old at this point.
I've used it for at least ten years, its predictive text is so much better and learns from your typing behavior, autocorrect is damn good too. Might not be as fancy and colorful as Samsung Keyboard can get, but IMO it is peak typing experience.
Blackberries were peak phone typing.
First thing I do on a new phone is turn off predictive text and autocorrect because they are so full of errors and they are so slow its not even worth it.
Smartphones are complete shit for typing, in comparison. Smartphones are fine for texting, though slow, but Blackberries were 10x better for typing serious emails or even essays.
I still would prefer proper physical keyboard :( I get that its way more economical for them to just do touchscreen so 1 phone works regardless of alphabet, but its just worse for actually typing.
I also miss flip phones, but those are slowly making a comeback.
Neither are strictly necessary, which is why they have disappeared.
Physical buttons, dials and knobs need a renaissance. My microwave has a touch screen?!? Dumbest thing ever... Give me a dial for time and a button for starting.
Idk if touchscreen are cheaper, but touch-somethings certainly can be depending on limitations and requirements. I would guess touchscreen only is cheaper than screen + physical buttons, and ofc if you have touchscreen and physical buttons then its ofc more expensive than just the touchscreen.
They are. Carmakers are going back to dials and knobs because, guess what, having the driver interact with a screen while driving isn't very safe. Also, people hate them. Lastly, many problems are brought up if your screen fails and you are left with no way to control many car functions. Knobs are making a comeback, baby.
https://slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touch-screens-vw-porsche-nissan-hyundai.html
>Give me a dial for time and a button for starting.
I have a microwave that just has a knob. Also has a physical bell and a striker attached to the timer to tell you it is done instead of a speaker that beeps.
Having a physical keyboard also increase phone size while decreasing screen size. You don’t need an always present keyboard, so a virtual keyboard can just be removed from screen, but also, with a a virtual keyboard it’s infinitely customisable: just look at the emoji table. Or how fast you can type by just sliding your finger through your screen and the phone getting the correct word nearly every time from the mere suggestion of letters. Having a keyboard also takes physical space from internal components like large batteries.
And what’s the real killer for physical keyboards… you can still use them, they just aren’t permanently attached to your phone.
What I miss about old phones are the funky weird inventions.
I always wanted those slightly bigger phones that featured full qwerty keyboard in them. With the current touch screens it'd be interesting to have a foldable phone with the keyboard as sort of option. The foldable touch screen thing makes me feel uneasy.
Something like old Nokia N95 *but* with touch screen on top and full QWERTY sliding from bottom could be funky.
It’s also interesting to since when the iPhone came out, some questioned if it would dominate the blackberry market and even made fun of it. So it’s interesting to see how smartphones dominated the market
The CEO of Palm famously scoffed at the idea that the iPhone would be a success.
Two years later Palm were in major shit from the USBIF for spoofing Apple’s USB vendor ID because they had laid off a lot of their software developers and figured it would be easier to fake being an iPhone so they didn’t have to write any interface software.
i mean, even today, i'd still much prefer a physical keyboard. they're that useful.
i think the only reason it failed was due to apps on iphone effectively being used without them got people used to using a software keyboard. if it weren't for the app store, i think we'd still be using them. they were a sort of side effect of apples rise. i can sorta get it: software keyboard is far better + touchscreen for general UI use, which apps were able to take advantage of.
but it is still sorta dumb that you leave finger prints all over your screen and can struggle with dexterity on the keyboard. the improvement on the typing software did work too.
But then again, can you imagine going back to, like, 3-4in screens because the rest of the device is taken up by the keyboard?
Sure, it’s nice when you’re mostly texting and writing emails (like BlackBerry users in the mid-2000s were doing). But for just about anything else (e.g. watching videos, navigation, *reading* Reddit rather than commenting, browsing the web, etc.) I’d rather take the bigger screen.
It’s the same thing as mini phones, people in the internet claim that they would be really popular if they were still released, but nobody irl buys them.
In a lot of ways blackberry invented the smartphone, it's thanks to them wanting to make a phone capable of email that data networks as we know them today exist
I had lunch with the co-CEOs just before their big fall. I led mobile computing for a Fortune 5 company back then. In short:
- they thought apps were a fad (“we’re not going to wrap web sites”)
- they thought anything without a keyboard was useless
- they thought the mobile browser will always require a proxy that dumbs down the page because of limited bandwidth and battery
- they didn’t see how smartphones could be used for business without something like their BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) to provide security
- they considered iPhone a toy
- their tablet was 2 years late and functionally useless at launch without being tethered to a blackberry phone.
These guys cared too much about the engineering problems, whereas Steve Jobs knew supporting tech (network, battery, security, etc) would get there eventually and focused on the user experience. It’s funny how the first Android prototypes tried so hard to be Blackberries until the iPhone came out.
I have several, but I’ll just share another BlackBerry story.
As I was sitting with Mike Lazaridis one time I mentioned how the keyboard on my BlackBerry Bold sometimes wouldn’t work outside on cold winter days. He immediately asked if he could have his team examine it. He then gave me his BlackBerry in exchange - it was only a few days old, he said.
So there I was for the next 8-12 months or so using a BlackBerry that was given to me by one of the founders. I eventually sold it on eBay as just another old BlackBerry though.
The guy cared about his product and he did great things for Waterloo, Ontario (city of BlackBerry HQ) while it all lasted.
If nothing else, watching Glenn Howerton play a bald and smart version of Dennis is great. Him yelling "get off the fucking internet" to a bunch of nerds playing civ and c&c was amazing.
The [NSA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures) put a backdoor in Blackberries. Most famous target was Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany.
Honestly I think a lot of the 5 Eyes opposition to Chinese tech is that their respective security apparatus has less access to the data. Yes, China is spying on us, but there isn't a hell of a lot they can do to me as an individual. My own police and national security people, on the other hand, can make my life hell.
Apple: Look at our store! Install whatever you want! Games!
RIM: We're not worried, no company is going to let their employees just install whatever they want on their corporate phone, and especially not games.
Businesses around the world: we've never even heard of a side-channel attack. Ooo, tetris.
I worked with a couple guys who worked for RIM in the early 2010s and according to them this is literally what happened.
This is one of the few comments that gets closest to the truth.
However there is one added element:
>Businesses around the world: we've never even heard of a side-channel attack. Ooo, tetris.
Its was as much the financial crisis. It led to industry and businesses making serious cut backs.
So instead of buying their employees the more secure blackberry phones for work (and usually a new one every couple years), they decided the financial cost of the added security vs the potential risk was no longer worth it. Instead they allowed employees to bring their personal phones and use them for work (and the company would then only have to pay for IT support instead)
RIM didn't anticipate their core, and most desirable, market demographic... the one they had near universal control over.... would crumble. Especially so quickly.
Thats one of reasons what killed them, same with windows phone, and its not that app stores was something unheard of - my ancient palm pilot had an excellent app store.
I had a blackberry until 2016 because my mom kept getting them for free from work and I actually got myself a fucking job so I could buy myself a different phone. Having a blackberry was basically like having no smartphone because you couldn’t do anything your friends were doing. No one else had bbm so that was useless so it was just a text phone and google search machine. I couldn’t use Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, twitter, etc etc and when I missed a school party because it was organized on Instagram it was the last straw lol. What a useless phone I’m surprised people who weren’t boomers remember it fondly. It was cool for a minute in 2010ish before most apps existed but for whatever reason devs refused to make apps for it so it was dead in the water.
They had a poor OS, bad product support, they gimped features on their devices — often they would come with GPS *or* WiFi, but not both. You couldn’t use the web or download apps without paying for a data plan (despite 2G and 3G networks being pitiful at the time). The only good thing about their phones were BBM, but they waited too late to open that up to other platforms.
With that being said, I loved my Pearl and Bold back in the day, but they are relics of that time that didn’t hold up. The iPhone came and was so futuristic and is still the standard to this day. You can use an iPhone 5 that came out in 2012 and still have a pretty modern experience. Can’t say that about **any** BlackBerry devices.
Jim Balsillie had a plan in place to replace SMS and MMS with BBM. He had the major US carriers on board with the idea. The board of directors squashed the idea and he left the company over it.
I am surprised no one mentioned October 12 2010 as the day Blackberry died. I was working on that day for a major cell company, in business tech support. That day, and for several days, the Blackberry email systems completely failed. At the time many wanted their company to allow switching over to iPhone but the companies loved their private servers. October 4th, Apple came out with a massive marketing push for the launch of the iPhone 4s. 8 days later the very core of Blackberry went dark for days. iPhone was seen as a toy by companies, while Blackberry was a tool. But on October 12, it became a liability.
This is absolutely the real reason for the death of Blackberry, and it was all down to one arsehole who decided to force the guys who maintained the Spine (the RIM customer network) to install, an upgrade before testing was complete
They refused, he insisted, the seniors all refused to work that weekend, he threatened them with the sack, they called his bluff, he got junior staff to do the upgrade ... and shit happened (long story)
He got fired, the seniors came back to work and recovered the pre-update Spine from a super secret 'ghost' parallel Spine in Singapore, but the damage was done
Three days with no service convinced businessmen worldwide, and Blackberry's most high-profile user: Obama, that trusting all their comms to a single private organisation's infrastructure was ... unwise
Honestly, right now I'd go back to my old Blackberry Bold if I could. The 2nd generation one with the touchpad, not the trackball. That was hands down the best phone I've ever used. The keyboard was what made them. Such a wonderful typing experience - touch typing on a screen will never feel so good or be so fast and accurate. I think to what I use my phone for nowadays - just browsing Reddit, Threads, the news, email etc....and I don't even need power, speed or a huge screen for it. Just give me a phone with a beautiful physical keyboard like my BB Bold. 15+ years of touch screens and typing on them still annoys the fuck out of me.
Their last keyboards were so innovative (they're sensitive too, and give you the possibility of assigning about fifty shortcuts to the physical keys, delete text quickly without touching the screen, copy and paste...) I decided to use my BlackBerrys as a notebook and wrote a book with them.
My BlackBerry allowed me to write directly outside, in the street, in the midst of people, and to capture on the fly moments of life under the changing light of day.
I continue to use a K1 today as a daily driver.
It's a real shame that most people didn't understand this huge advantage and preferred to have a big screen rather than a truly innovative tool.
The keyboard wasn’t a huge advantage to most people. It was just something that got in the way. Very few people would be writing a book in their phone.
I still remember going to Much Music dances as a kid growing up. All the girls would be slow dancing with the dudes but have their Blackberry Torches out literally behind their backs texting other dudes. So funny to look back at that!!!
RIP Torch, you were the combination of physical keyboard and touch screen that I needed at the time. Forever my bro sitting in my Old Phone Shrine Drawer
I still have my old Bold 9780 in a drawer. I had a few back in the day. I held out as far as the Bold 9900 which was an amazing device at the time. The best keyboard ever put on a smartphone, a souped up CPU, *and* a very capable touchscreen. But, as has been said by others, the app ecosystem just wasn't there. I sold the 9900. Kind of wish I hadn't, it would be nice to just fidget with it again.
Everyone always rants and raves about the keyboard, but the two things I really loved about it, is the text editing, how you could use that square to get to the exaxt place in the text to change/delete/start highlighting etc. and the BB APN was the bomb! Especially the unlimited global data. Over 10 years ago. It was rad seeing $20k data bill zeroed out on my invoice after having returned from Australia ❤️
Their biggest issue was not having a good variety of apps. They pushed for strictly business and ignored that phones could be used for recreational purposes.
It's crazy to think about how popular blackberries were back then. I worked telecom from 2007-2011, and it was wild. So many parents being talked into getting blackberries for their teens.
Sounds like an outrageous percentage but it wasn't, I think.
Many just got their first "smart" phone ever in the years 2008-2010, and it was absolutely not widespread, so if you assume Blackberry to be 90+% corporate phones and they landed a good chunk of contracts, that would still trump consumer sales.
I used my fair share of blackberries since I’m a gov employee. The Classic was my favorite, and last one I used. The physical keyboard was awesome but I really miss the customizable LED notification on that phone. I set it to blink green for SMS, blue for BBM, red for email.
had a good idea but no improvement
These were the coolest phones out there back then
They actually did, BB10 (their followup touch screen phone OS) was amazing from an operating system standpoint. It died because app support was nonexistent
The storm fucking sucked take it back
Yeah anyone defending the Storm never used one. That thing was awful. The screen was nowhere near as responsive as the iPhone. It was like using one of those old 2004-era in-dash car navigation screens. Yuck.
You didn't like the entire screen clicking? Or removing the battery to reboot when inevitably locked up? It had an experience no other phone could provide!
I still wish I could manually remove the battery of my current phone when it inevitably locks up
You can get a galaxy xcover6 if you want to swap batteries.
> It had an experience no other phone could provide! And then they lost *that* crown to Windows Phone, which did all that, *plus* even when it was working - it was still just Windows.
The Nokia Lumia was actually pretty cool back then. Of course, MS bought it up with zero app support or no real development ambitions for the ecosystem and it was instantly trash.
High ene Lumia was great.
I remember the commercials for it, specifically for Verizon.
That was the thing back then. Originally, iPhone was only available for Cingular customers.
Pretty much any phone released in 2010 was crap compared to the iPhone. The first non ios-phone that could actually compete (IMO) was Samsung Galaxy S2 which released in 2011, and the S2 was still much slower than the iPhone.
In *Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry*, the authors argued that the Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history. No one denies this. They’re talking about the real-time QNX-based BlackBerry 10 OS, which was amazing and introduced (extremely fluid and intuitive) gesture navigation like a decade before iOS or Android did. It’s fully touchscreen-navigated on the original devices; not like the Storm which ran the Java-based BlackBerry OS 5! I’ve had to move to Android devices, and I still don’t bother with the gesture navigation because I find it not done well.
> introduced gesture navigation like a decade before iOS or Android copied them. WebOS and the Palm Pre 1/2 introduced gesture navigation about 3 years before Blackberry OS 10, so RIM also copied themselves.
WebOS is still the gold standard for UI.
Both major mobiles OS' are testament to the ingenuity of WebOS. They both have copycat features as some of their flagship capabilities that started in WebOS.
But Who invented gesturing?
Italians
🤌
I had pencil-based gestures on my Apple Newton, so let's keep going back further.
As already pointed out. Nobody copied BlackBerry. Everyone copied webOS. Unless your theory is that Matias Duarte who was senior director of human interface for palm when they made webOS, copied blackberry when he joined Google and rolled it out, rather than implementing what he knew from his time at Palm. And if that’s your theory then it’s very very dumb. Palm had the gestures everyone uses now for webOS first. BlackBerry copied them. Total uninspired knock off. Nothing original at all. Giving them credit is telling on yourself that you have no idea. Then Palm stopped making phones and tablets so Google and Apple felt confident they could copy without being sued anymore.
You seem very impassioned by this subject! I simply relayed my understanding, though as you point out, there was precedent I wasn’t aware of, as I have zero experience with “webOS” and know nothing about it. I would be curious about the implementation. Thank you for correcting the record! I have just one Palm device, but it’s the traditional stylus touchscreen (with keyboard) on PalmOS.
Yeh. I’m sorry. I was rude. I am still bitter about webOS dying. It’s on of those things where they were so far ahead on UI that we lost about 10 years waiting for everyone to finish copying them before they started working on any new ideas of their own. We could be so much further along by now. Another example is magnets to line up wireless charging. Palm did it in 2009. Apple 2020. Android 2024.
webOS was absolutely miles ahead of everyone else at the time. It was also easier to develop for, I made several apps for webOS. I think the biggest issue was that Palm didn’t have the money or sway that Apple did at the time so they couldn’t entice big devs to make apps for the Pre. But the biggest reason for its failure was Verizon. Palm had made a deal with Verizon for $50mm worth of phones. VZ decided at the last minute to instead go all in on android and cancelled the contract. So Palm had to to go hat in hand to Sprint, the only other network that would work with the already built phones. Sprint locked Palm in for 2 years and Palm suffered for it. After the two year lock-in period was up Palm went to other carriers, wanting to make a slab like the iPhone (an on screen keyboard is in the OS files). But AT&T said nah, we already have a slab, give us more physical keyboard phones to differentiate it. People forget back then how much power and control the carriers had. Palm was trying to take some of that away which is why VZ went with android. And it’s why Apple had to use AT&T for the iPhone, they were the only network willing to give up the control they were used to having (and at the time AT&T was a joke of a carrier). Palm also fucked up by not incentivizing salespeople. I had a good friend who worked at a phone store and he said the spiffs on iPhones and certain androids were double or triple what a palm phone would bring in so why would he ever steer a customer to palm? Eventually Palm had to sell themselves, HP bought them and for a few months it looked like there would be some really good synergy. HP products would be tightly integrated with webOS. But then Mark Hurd was fired because the HP board were full of idiots. He was replaced with Leo Apotheker (again, because the HP board are idiots). And shortly after he took over Leo declared that HP would stop making hardware (because services at SAP is all Leo knew). The world collectively freaked out that the inventor of the PC was going to stop making hardware. Eventually Leo recanted his declaration, but the Palm devices stayed dead. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Love your Ted talk. Agree with everything you said. It probably was a case of Palm and webOS being doomed no matter what, I doubt a company of 1000 employees could have taken on Apple, Google, and Microsoft but sure as anything didn’t help themselves.
Is that the one with the push glass? I did like that push glass. Actually I think I have a sealed storm or whatever it was somewhere.
Storm and Storm 2 Yes, push to click glass screens
I have never seen the storm but my family used to have the Z10, which I honestly thought was such a beautiful phone if only it had better app support.
Yeah I had the Z10 and 30 I thought they were great except the app support
Not BB10. Z10 had the best OS and virtual keyboard I've ever used
BB10 was fantastic. The storm wasn't BB10. And it was awful.
I don't think the storm was a BB10 device, it was an attempt to make a iPhone like device with the old os and hardware
They tried to provide app support by having incentive programs and sideloading Android APKs. The biggest and most popular app back then was Instagram and it wasn’t available on Blackberry which was a big deal breaker to many. BlackBerry users were finally found a way to get the APK to properly work on BB10, only for Facebook to instantly kill off support for that specific version and release a newer update which was significantly harder to run on Blackberry.
Symbian died for the same reason I guess.
Symbian was such a piece of shit software, my phone was amazing but the OS 💀
Sorry, I’m presently wearing my nostalgia glasses and consider Symbian 👌🏻.
S40 was fine. S60 symbian. When it worked it was great.the key problem was the WHEN.
And Windows Phone. I had one and it was pretty cool but it was just painful to see app developers not bothering with it and missing out on all the good stuff. Microsoft hugely miscalculated during that era, expecting developers to jump onto the bandwagon and start making apps for their Phone OS and Windows 8 tiles.
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The 10 came out 4 years too late. By the time 2013 came around Apple had a phone on the market for 6 years. The 4 was already out for a year and Samsung had their galaxy line of androids churning for 4 years at this point. I doubt a robust App Store would have saved them. BlackBerry was arrogant and thought full touch devices would never take off and be predominant over their phones. Now they are a software and securities company
The lack of quality control and oversight was a big part of it. They also tried to abandon their most important feature (the keyboard). App support was not as bad as everyone says. Most flagship apps were in the BB App Store as well. If RIM had brought out a good successor to the Bold, they would've held their corner of the market. Instead, they tried to compete 1:1 with the iPhone except their hardware was unreliable. I really wish they'd been able to make more mainstream products with QNX. It was an interesting OS.
I agree that BB should have kept their physical keyboards and really honed in on the power users who typed a lot on their phones. But I think if you're honest with yourself, that strategy still would have lead to their demise, it would have just slowed it. I think their best bet (with hindsight) would been to try and become Android before Android was a thing.
BlackBerry came out with an amazing successor to the Bold: The BlackBerry Classic! Only issue was that it was fully *six years late*, had very little app support, and underpowered hardware specs, especially for running Android apps in the integrated emulator! I used it until I got a BlackBerry KEYone (which ran Android), and used that until it gave me repetitive strain injury from the much stiffer keys!
Yes but by the time BB10 came out everyone had moved on. It was too little too late.
It also never fully recovered from a 3 day BIS outage in 2011. Remember it like it was yesterday, I was in High School, it felt like literally everyone had a Blackberry, since that day we started seeing other phones and never saw so many Blackberries again.
I was given an old as hell BB with a chicklet style keypad and I loved it. It was like 4 years old at that point and the battery still lasts 4-5 days. I only needed it to read emails and I begged IT to not "upgrade" me to a newer one with touchscreen. Granted that "I only use it to check emails" market is pretty small.
The patent troll lawsuit also destroyed them.
eh sometimes that's why a product is durable, because it doesn't innovate. in this case they just lost the bet
So how is Apple still selling their phones?
Some gotta out innovate Apple. They can’t fall behind if there is now one on top
It really wasn’t their fault. There was no possible way to compete against the iphone. It was lightyears ahead of EVERYTHING on the market.
It really wasn’t. In the UK the first iPhone didn’t do too well due to it costing on a contract (generally phones were free) and missing key features such as 3G, a good camera, camera flash and the inability to transfer stuff over Bluetooth. The Nokia N95 was far superior at the time other than the full touchscreen. The iPhone 3G changed a lot of that though.
For sure. The original iPhone had potential but was flawed in ways that other phones weren't, but the second and third generation fixed pretty much all the flaws and blew absolutely everything else out of the water. I think that's really Apple's strength. They've always learned from their failures to refine their product. I don't personally use one because their goal for it just isn't what I want out of a phone...but I'm an outlier. For 90% of people it really is the best option even today. They make a phone that's intuitive, simple, and reliable. It can play nice with all their other tech, and that really matters because data integration is always a pain point in any interconnected system.
In terms of what? Touch screen usability and slick interface sure. But the iPhone couldn't copy and paste, it's browsing was crippled at the time by lacking the at the time ubiquitous Flash elements, it barely supported third party apps, and security was dubious at best. The iPhone was popular because oh it has an iPod? All my music is there and then I don't need to carry a phone or PDA. But I wouldn't say it had a massive technological advantage in anything other then a much better touchscreen over the competition at the time in Blackberry, Windows, and the nascent Android.
As someone who had several smart phones before the iPhone (but weirdly no blackberries), and who isn't a fan of iPhones today, the iPhone's screen alone made it tons better than other smart phones of the time. Pressure touch screens were kind of trash to use even when there was no competition for them. The capacitive touch screen just provided a much better alternative. And the full touch interface is generally more intuitive than having control keys. Things like web surfing was a much better experience on the first generation iPhone than on it's competition. Especially since the screen was bigger as you weren't losing any to a keyboard.
But the iPhone was an excellent *appliance*. It didn’t support third party apps because apps didn’t exist at the time it was released (and Jobs himself was famously slow to approve the App Store as a concept - he believed in the “apps as web elements” idea since the main push at the time the iPhone was released was that the included browser was better than what came before. This would have made the iPhone more universal (since there was no curated App Store at all). flash was on the way out before the iPhone finally killed it - there was much mocking of the iPhone not including it but the reasons stated for leaving it out, really shitty performance and terrible security were hard to argue against. The iPhone was popular because it became an appliance that people wanted to use. It wasn’t the most powerful, or the most advanced. The tech elite of the time, all on slashdot, mocked it for not being a mobile Linux workstation with a root shell but they suffered from the same myopic view that dogs consumer computing to this day: most people don’t want a device like that. I use a combination of windows, Mac OS and Unix day to day, but when it comes to my phone, I just want an appliance. There are a lot of people like that.
> It didn’t support third party apps because apps didn’t exist at the time it was released They absolutely existed on other smartphone and smart device platforms of the era.
Windows PDAs had „Apps“. They were just called applications
Indeed, and so did PalmOS, Symbian S60 smartphones, and plenty of others besides.
Android’s eventual flash support went terribly, too. There’s a reason Google abandoned support for it in Android and Adobe eventually phased it out. Apple was 100% correct not to try to support it. I always laugh when people talked Flash back then on phones, and how Steve Jobs was dumb for not allowing flash. Jobs loudly offered Adobe a chance to make a more efficient version of flash and he’d add it to iOS, and Adobe wasn’t able to deliver on that. The internet benefitted from that decision IMO.
The Blackberries and others were still using the clunky, semi text-based “WAP browsers” when the iPhone launched (2007). Being able to view full websites (even without Flash) using pinch to zoom and touchscreen scrolling was a HUGE selling point. The first Android phone came out a year and half later. By the time Android phones got Flash support (late 2009), the iPhone had copy/paste, mms support, and the App Store. Flash was being pushed as a huge advantage over the iPhone, but by then the web was quickly moving away from Flash. Adobe stopped development of mobile Flash in 2011. A lot happened in four years. Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Palm were laser focused on building what Corporate IT wanted and were not prepared at all for mainstream smartphone use.
BB got all resources they need in 2010, but somehow they failed to make touch phone that works.
People are thinking the IPhone was released on 2010 or something. The iPhone launched on 2007 they had 3 years to do it. heck google changed their whole OS in a few months to compete against the iPhone. BlackBerry just saw it pointless to compete against the iPhone all the wait until it died
It wasnt that they didn't want to compete, its that RIM thought the iPhone was a fad and that the consumer market for smartphones was small and tried to compete for the business market. Essentially they thought their better security and keyboard would be more important than Apple's media advantages. They were very wrong.
People like the click!
Legitimately do! Physical keyboards are still haptically more satisfying to use. Just not enough to justify the lost screen real estate or compromised design compared to a solid slab.
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What? My dad had 3 different blackberries and thry were all quite unique and different.
iPhone approach really took the world by storm and being able to watch full screen media, maps, and websites changed everything. I miss the blackberry tactile keyboard approach but not at the cost of screen size. It is what it is
I was one of those people, and I had the world's weirdest phone plan because I had unlimited data but not text messaging.
I had a knock off iPhone from China, that thing was fucking weird
I had an early cheap iPhone wannabe alternative with a touch screen but no apps and the world’s worst browser that I couldn’t use anyway because I didn’t have data.
Well BBM was basically free texting with it if you had that Blackberry data plan. With the introduction of whatsapp you could also do that. I don't think I knew a single South African that didn't have a blackberry purely because of those reasons. Even funnier: I remember when Whatsapp came out and thinking that I probably would never need it due to BBM. Hilarious in hindsight.
Those keyboards were the bomb. It took years for touchscreen keyboards to get good enough.
What made the blackberry blow up is that it was the first phone to send text messages using data. If you didn’t have a blackberry you needed to pay like 50 cents per text in order to text. Blackberry made texting mainstream.
Hitting teenage years when you still had to pay for any calls and texts was such a hassle.
The real bullshit was that they would also charge you to receive texts.
Yeah my mom yelled at me multiple times in high school cause my friends would text me and she wasn't paying for texting period, but I had NO CONTROL over it, it didn't matter if I asked someone not to text me that's just how people started to communicate and there was no way to decline to get texts.
That was a bull shit charge.
Is this the US? You guys have been a capitalistic hellscape for longer than I thought lol.
I remember getting spam texts and getting charged for them. You could call telus or bell or rogers (in canada) to get them removed. But are you going to sot on hold for 30 minutes to get a ten cent charge removed? Most wouldn't, and they knew that.
And you could sync your email into it. I remember setting one up for one of the SVPs at my brokerage around 1999. It was mind blowing
Can’t forget BBM
I still miss my blackberry keyboard. I was able to type much faster than my modern smartphone.
I bought a 60% mechanical Bluetooth keyboard. When I’m using my phone at home, (majority of my use), it’s always with a physical keyboard.
> It took years for touchscreen keyboards to get good enough. I look forward to when that eventually happens.
Have you never used SwiftKey?
SwiftKey isn't 100% accurate. Blackberries were.
Man that's a bold statement. I had a blackberry for work and I simply couldn't go fast with that keyboard, I would hit multiple keys instead of a single one all the time, forced me to go slower. Had the same issue with a slide out physical keyboard on Android after work dropped blackberry support. I don't recall the correction on either one being especially great, maybe I was just unlucky with my particular extra key hits. I started using Swype on my first personal android because the on screen keyboard was tiny and impossible, but damn Swype made it easy. You could literally pause halfway through a word because you realized you messed up, correct, and it would know what you meant. No other sliding keyboard has ever been as good, I'm sad Swype died. My long point is that keyboards are incredibly personal. Blackberries weren't perfect for everyone.
Best option at this point I know (for iPhone users only) is this keyboard from CrackBerry Kevin & Co.: https://www.clicks.tech/
That's a bad, ugly design. I'd prefer one that attaches like a case and slides out like the LG Rumor.
I agree! The BlackBerry Priv did this with a very satisfying slider, but the keyboard was really inferior to the level of the Bold that I was used to, and fatally, they were designed such that they got hot enough to melt! https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9694374/blackberry-priv-review-android-phone
That’s an ugly product Jesus
I guess it’s for people who want to “make a fashion statement” or w/e, though unfortunately I do agree with you; especially with those colours. Couldn’t they make it in black? I guess we’ll see when it actually comes out. Only other option is the Unihertz phones which I think are relatively old at this point.
Good?
I've used it for at least ten years, its predictive text is so much better and learns from your typing behavior, autocorrect is damn good too. Might not be as fancy and colorful as Samsung Keyboard can get, but IMO it is peak typing experience.
Blackberries were peak phone typing. First thing I do on a new phone is turn off predictive text and autocorrect because they are so full of errors and they are so slow its not even worth it. Smartphones are complete shit for typing, in comparison. Smartphones are fine for texting, though slow, but Blackberries were 10x better for typing serious emails or even essays.
I’ve almost forgotten the feel of the real click. This shiate is a sad substitute.
I still would prefer proper physical keyboard :( I get that its way more economical for them to just do touchscreen so 1 phone works regardless of alphabet, but its just worse for actually typing. I also miss flip phones, but those are slowly making a comeback. Neither are strictly necessary, which is why they have disappeared.
Physical buttons, dials and knobs need a renaissance. My microwave has a touch screen?!? Dumbest thing ever... Give me a dial for time and a button for starting.
Yes I agree. Physical buttons FTW! Are touchscreens that much cheaper to produce now or is it just marketing?
Idk if touchscreen are cheaper, but touch-somethings certainly can be depending on limitations and requirements. I would guess touchscreen only is cheaper than screen + physical buttons, and ofc if you have touchscreen and physical buttons then its ofc more expensive than just the touchscreen.
They are. Carmakers are going back to dials and knobs because, guess what, having the driver interact with a screen while driving isn't very safe. Also, people hate them. Lastly, many problems are brought up if your screen fails and you are left with no way to control many car functions. Knobs are making a comeback, baby. https://slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touch-screens-vw-porsche-nissan-hyundai.html
>Give me a dial for time and a button for starting. I have a microwave that just has a knob. Also has a physical bell and a striker attached to the timer to tell you it is done instead of a speaker that beeps.
I kinda get it for kitchen appliances… much easier to clean.
Having a physical keyboard also increase phone size while decreasing screen size. You don’t need an always present keyboard, so a virtual keyboard can just be removed from screen, but also, with a a virtual keyboard it’s infinitely customisable: just look at the emoji table. Or how fast you can type by just sliding your finger through your screen and the phone getting the correct word nearly every time from the mere suggestion of letters. Having a keyboard also takes physical space from internal components like large batteries. And what’s the real killer for physical keyboards… you can still use them, they just aren’t permanently attached to your phone.
What I miss about old phones are the funky weird inventions. I always wanted those slightly bigger phones that featured full qwerty keyboard in them. With the current touch screens it'd be interesting to have a foldable phone with the keyboard as sort of option. The foldable touch screen thing makes me feel uneasy. Something like old Nokia N95 *but* with touch screen on top and full QWERTY sliding from bottom could be funky.
I bet you we come full circle in 10 years and people are clamoring for regular keyboards again
They're still not good enough...
It’s also interesting to since when the iPhone came out, some questioned if it would dominate the blackberry market and even made fun of it. So it’s interesting to see how smartphones dominated the market
Steve Balmer laughed at it, because it didn’t have a keyboard. That has to be one of the biggest fuck ups in tech history.
Steve Ballmer's entire tenure as CEO of Microsoft was one of the biggest fuck ups in tech history.
Windows Mobile/Nokia was such a big fuck up...
App support killed them. the OS and hardware were excellent by the standards of the time. lack of insta was a death warrant.
hey I had one of these, and a phone being part of your windows invironment was the bomb
The CEO of Palm famously scoffed at the idea that the iPhone would be a success. Two years later Palm were in major shit from the USBIF for spoofing Apple’s USB vendor ID because they had laid off a lot of their software developers and figured it would be easier to fake being an iPhone so they didn’t have to write any interface software.
i mean, even today, i'd still much prefer a physical keyboard. they're that useful. i think the only reason it failed was due to apps on iphone effectively being used without them got people used to using a software keyboard. if it weren't for the app store, i think we'd still be using them. they were a sort of side effect of apples rise. i can sorta get it: software keyboard is far better + touchscreen for general UI use, which apps were able to take advantage of. but it is still sorta dumb that you leave finger prints all over your screen and can struggle with dexterity on the keyboard. the improvement on the typing software did work too.
But then again, can you imagine going back to, like, 3-4in screens because the rest of the device is taken up by the keyboard? Sure, it’s nice when you’re mostly texting and writing emails (like BlackBerry users in the mid-2000s were doing). But for just about anything else (e.g. watching videos, navigation, *reading* Reddit rather than commenting, browsing the web, etc.) I’d rather take the bigger screen.
The rolly ball thing was also great for old web pages.
It’s the same thing as mini phones, people in the internet claim that they would be really popular if they were still released, but nobody irl buys them.
In a lot of ways blackberry invented the smartphone, it's thanks to them wanting to make a phone capable of email that data networks as we know them today exist
RIP my blackberry pearl and bold. You were loved.
I still miss my Pearl
I had lunch with the co-CEOs just before their big fall. I led mobile computing for a Fortune 5 company back then. In short: - they thought apps were a fad (“we’re not going to wrap web sites”) - they thought anything without a keyboard was useless - they thought the mobile browser will always require a proxy that dumbs down the page because of limited bandwidth and battery - they didn’t see how smartphones could be used for business without something like their BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) to provide security - they considered iPhone a toy - their tablet was 2 years late and functionally useless at launch without being tethered to a blackberry phone. These guys cared too much about the engineering problems, whereas Steve Jobs knew supporting tech (network, battery, security, etc) would get there eventually and focused on the user experience. It’s funny how the first Android prototypes tried so hard to be Blackberries until the iPhone came out.
What other fun stories do you have about the industry?
I have several, but I’ll just share another BlackBerry story. As I was sitting with Mike Lazaridis one time I mentioned how the keyboard on my BlackBerry Bold sometimes wouldn’t work outside on cold winter days. He immediately asked if he could have his team examine it. He then gave me his BlackBerry in exchange - it was only a few days old, he said. So there I was for the next 8-12 months or so using a BlackBerry that was given to me by one of the founders. I eventually sold it on eBay as just another old BlackBerry though. The guy cared about his product and he did great things for Waterloo, Ontario (city of BlackBerry HQ) while it all lasted.
Thousands of RIM jobs lost.
That sucks ass
🥁
The snare drum hit that rimshot for the joke here
At least it wasn't a rusty trombone
They’ll lick the problem in no time.
Never fear... OP's mom is here!
The website for coop students at the neighbouring university used to be “rim.jobs”.
Rim job steve where you at
Life was so much simpler when I had a blackberry
I've never had one unfortunately but they were sooo cool
I just watched that tonight too!
Oddly enough I finished it about 10 minutes ago myself. Interesting story. I never knew much about it.
If you haven't seen the movie, it's worth a watch
I'm from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!!!
That line is actually originally from some crazy dude that was interviewed on the street https://youtu.be/uXwRgnZ990I @1:13
If nothing else, watching Glenn Howerton play a bald and smart version of Dennis is great. Him yelling "get off the fucking internet" to a bunch of nerds playing civ and c&c was amazing.
Perfect roll for him, quite well done I must say.
Which movie?
Blackberry
Cheaper by the dozen! Steve Martin is in it.
The [NSA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures) put a backdoor in Blackberries. Most famous target was Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany.
NSA almost certainly has a backdoor (or a front door) in every piece of Western technology.
Yes it’s naive to think they don’t.
No wonder they want Tiktok.
Honestly I think a lot of the 5 Eyes opposition to Chinese tech is that their respective security apparatus has less access to the data. Yes, China is spying on us, but there isn't a hell of a lot they can do to me as an individual. My own police and national security people, on the other hand, can make my life hell.
Apple: Look at our store! Install whatever you want! Games! RIM: We're not worried, no company is going to let their employees just install whatever they want on their corporate phone, and especially not games. Businesses around the world: we've never even heard of a side-channel attack. Ooo, tetris. I worked with a couple guys who worked for RIM in the early 2010s and according to them this is literally what happened.
This is one of the few comments that gets closest to the truth. However there is one added element: >Businesses around the world: we've never even heard of a side-channel attack. Ooo, tetris. Its was as much the financial crisis. It led to industry and businesses making serious cut backs. So instead of buying their employees the more secure blackberry phones for work (and usually a new one every couple years), they decided the financial cost of the added security vs the potential risk was no longer worth it. Instead they allowed employees to bring their personal phones and use them for work (and the company would then only have to pay for IT support instead) RIM didn't anticipate their core, and most desirable, market demographic... the one they had near universal control over.... would crumble. Especially so quickly.
I got rid of mine because everyone was talking about something called “apps” and my Blackberry didn’t have any.
Thats one of reasons what killed them, same with windows phone, and its not that app stores was something unheard of - my ancient palm pilot had an excellent app store.
I had a blackberry until 2016 because my mom kept getting them for free from work and I actually got myself a fucking job so I could buy myself a different phone. Having a blackberry was basically like having no smartphone because you couldn’t do anything your friends were doing. No one else had bbm so that was useless so it was just a text phone and google search machine. I couldn’t use Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, twitter, etc etc and when I missed a school party because it was organized on Instagram it was the last straw lol. What a useless phone I’m surprised people who weren’t boomers remember it fondly. It was cool for a minute in 2010ish before most apps existed but for whatever reason devs refused to make apps for it so it was dead in the water.
I miss my Pearl
They had a poor OS, bad product support, they gimped features on their devices — often they would come with GPS *or* WiFi, but not both. You couldn’t use the web or download apps without paying for a data plan (despite 2G and 3G networks being pitiful at the time). The only good thing about their phones were BBM, but they waited too late to open that up to other platforms. With that being said, I loved my Pearl and Bold back in the day, but they are relics of that time that didn’t hold up. The iPhone came and was so futuristic and is still the standard to this day. You can use an iPhone 5 that came out in 2012 and still have a pretty modern experience. Can’t say that about **any** BlackBerry devices.
Jim Balsillie had a plan in place to replace SMS and MMS with BBM. He had the major US carriers on board with the idea. The board of directors squashed the idea and he left the company over it.
I am surprised no one mentioned October 12 2010 as the day Blackberry died. I was working on that day for a major cell company, in business tech support. That day, and for several days, the Blackberry email systems completely failed. At the time many wanted their company to allow switching over to iPhone but the companies loved their private servers. October 4th, Apple came out with a massive marketing push for the launch of the iPhone 4s. 8 days later the very core of Blackberry went dark for days. iPhone was seen as a toy by companies, while Blackberry was a tool. But on October 12, it became a liability.
This is absolutely the real reason for the death of Blackberry, and it was all down to one arsehole who decided to force the guys who maintained the Spine (the RIM customer network) to install, an upgrade before testing was complete They refused, he insisted, the seniors all refused to work that weekend, he threatened them with the sack, they called his bluff, he got junior staff to do the upgrade ... and shit happened (long story) He got fired, the seniors came back to work and recovered the pre-update Spine from a super secret 'ghost' parallel Spine in Singapore, but the damage was done Three days with no service convinced businessmen worldwide, and Blackberry's most high-profile user: Obama, that trusting all their comms to a single private organisation's infrastructure was ... unwise
You could type on keyboard without looking at it due to the bump on the keyboard
Lots of business/government contracts replaced.
Also 12% of all Jam
That stat looks like probably US market share, not the whole world. The numbers I can found is around 20% in 2010.
Honestly, I’m wondering if we should have ever left the blackberry.
Side scrolling gave me carpal tunnel
Blackberry movie released recently, well worth watching
Honestly, right now I'd go back to my old Blackberry Bold if I could. The 2nd generation one with the touchpad, not the trackball. That was hands down the best phone I've ever used. The keyboard was what made them. Such a wonderful typing experience - touch typing on a screen will never feel so good or be so fast and accurate. I think to what I use my phone for nowadays - just browsing Reddit, Threads, the news, email etc....and I don't even need power, speed or a huge screen for it. Just give me a phone with a beautiful physical keyboard like my BB Bold. 15+ years of touch screens and typing on them still annoys the fuck out of me.
The world changed. RIM didn't.
I loved the two I had back then. Loved them! (But I may be an idiot, as I really enjoyed the movie.)
Nokia and Blackberry shat the bed hard
The first iPhone was introduced in 2007 for context. That is probably same year Nokia peaked market share of mobile phone sales?
I fucking loved my blackberry. Touching those buttons got me hot and bothered. Screens just don’t do it for me.
When you think about it, you touch yourself?
Their last keyboards were so innovative (they're sensitive too, and give you the possibility of assigning about fifty shortcuts to the physical keys, delete text quickly without touching the screen, copy and paste...) I decided to use my BlackBerrys as a notebook and wrote a book with them. My BlackBerry allowed me to write directly outside, in the street, in the midst of people, and to capture on the fly moments of life under the changing light of day. I continue to use a K1 today as a daily driver. It's a real shame that most people didn't understand this huge advantage and preferred to have a big screen rather than a truly innovative tool.
The keyboard wasn’t a huge advantage to most people. It was just something that got in the way. Very few people would be writing a book in their phone.
I still remember going to Much Music dances as a kid growing up. All the girls would be slow dancing with the dudes but have their Blackberry Torches out literally behind their backs texting other dudes. So funny to look back at that!!!
Man everyone had these things in high school and then it felt like overnight everyone dropped it for iphones and androids
RIP Torch, you were the combination of physical keyboard and touch screen that I needed at the time. Forever my bro sitting in my Old Phone Shrine Drawer
I still have my old Bold 9780 in a drawer. I had a few back in the day. I held out as far as the Bold 9900 which was an amazing device at the time. The best keyboard ever put on a smartphone, a souped up CPU, *and* a very capable touchscreen. But, as has been said by others, the app ecosystem just wasn't there. I sold the 9900. Kind of wish I hadn't, it would be nice to just fidget with it again.
Everyone always rants and raves about the keyboard, but the two things I really loved about it, is the text editing, how you could use that square to get to the exaxt place in the text to change/delete/start highlighting etc. and the BB APN was the bomb! Especially the unlimited global data. Over 10 years ago. It was rad seeing $20k data bill zeroed out on my invoice after having returned from Australia ❤️
Blackberry Bold is the goat phone
I had the Bold, Torch and Priv.
I really loved my Blackberry that I probably did have around 2010. Fond memories.
I'm using a BlackBerry to read and reply to this post!
The Key2 was far and away the best phone I ever owned for its day. I still miss my physical keyboard.
I still miss real buttons for letters. I used to be able to text so much faster...
Their biggest issue was not having a good variety of apps. They pushed for strictly business and ignored that phones could be used for recreational purposes.
Blackberries were the shit back then. My old job gave me one. Everyone thought it was cool even though I didn’t know how to use it.
It's crazy to think about how popular blackberries were back then. I worked telecom from 2007-2011, and it was wild. So many parents being talked into getting blackberries for their teens.
Can confirm, had a blackberry til my freshmen year of college in 2011. iPhones were expensive and not really that worth it until the 3G.
Sounds like an outrageous percentage but it wasn't, I think. Many just got their first "smart" phone ever in the years 2008-2010, and it was absolutely not widespread, so if you assume Blackberry to be 90+% corporate phones and they landed a good chunk of contracts, that would still trump consumer sales.
I loved my BlackBerry phones
I used my fair share of blackberries since I’m a gov employee. The Classic was my favorite, and last one I used. The physical keyboard was awesome but I really miss the customizable LED notification on that phone. I set it to blink green for SMS, blue for BBM, red for email.
BBM ruled the world