what was the height of cool before the iphone hit the scene in 2007.
maybe for you it was busting out your motorola razor at
warped tour but for a lot of others it was actually the blackberry but beyond
the botanical name and an addictiveness that led observers to call it the
crackberry the blackberry was actually a very different kind of smartphone from
what we're used to today it was actually initially marketed to business people as
an alternative to lugging around the slow heavy laptops of the late 1990s and
early 2000s in fact blackberry employees
even gave the devices a way for free trials to people that they saw using
laptops encouraging them to give the blackberry a try because it was an
always connected device that would instantly notify the user if they got a
new email now because email was quickly becoming a preferred method of
communication for businesses a device with push email notifications as well as
an ergonomic full qwerty keyboard that made typing significantly easier than on
other handheld devices caught on pretty quickly remember guys
this was before touch screen technology became widespread and although cellular
data speeds at the time were very slow
sending and receiving a few lines of text in an email didn't require much
bandwidth so suddenly there was this device that was much more convenient
than either a laptop or a palm pilot
which for the earlier models had to be synchronized manually with your pc so
blackberries quickly found their way into the hands of executives and
politicians everywhere not just for email but also to keep their personal
information safe thanks to the additional encryption of blackberry
messenger compared to traditional sms instant messaging this set the stage for
the company to keep expanding and eventually release a very successful
line of devices that we would recognize today as true smartphones albeit still
with the full physical keyboard that became one of blackberry's signature
features and then the iphone hit the scene and it
didn't take long for the blackberry to fade away into obscurity
but why was this just a result of hype from
apple's flashy advertisements with
white earphones well it turns out that while that may
have been a factor blackberry also missed some key indicators about where
the industry was headed when the iphone was announced blackberry was still
growing by leaps and bounds and they didn't see the point in trying to
compete with a device that they viewed as something for younger less serious
consumers and to boot the blackberry execs assumed that cell networks simply
wouldn't be able to keep up with how much data the iphone was designed to
send and receive instead blackberry decided to keep
selling primarily to business users that wanted a secure platform and honestly it
kind of seemed to make sense at the time as this was exactly the formula that
vaulted blackberry to their position as a major player on the phone scene
however business users were much more easily wowed by the iphone and later
Android phones as well than blackberry anticipated not only did the touchscreen
centric design of competing phones have more futuristic sex appeal iOS and
Android were more open platforms in that apple and google designed them
specifically with third-party developers in mind that could release thousands of
apps to expand their device's functionality blackberry on the other hand continued
to rely on first party apps at least in part because it still thought of its
phones as just that phones rather than the do-it-all devices
that now dominate the market the death knell though didn't come until
companies started figuring out that the more consumer-focused iphones and
Android phones that their employees already owned were just as capable as a
blackberry if not more so so at that
point turns out businesses just love saving money
who knew right they generally started having their employees bring those to work and use
them for that too instead of investing in a fleet of blackberries
and i mean there were other missteps too remember how controversial apple's
decision to dump adobe flash was well although it was inconvenient at the
time apple was ultimately correct that the mobile industry would move away from
it which you can learn more about here by the way blackberry on the other hand continued
to make supporting flash a priority even though the hardware inside their phones
wasn't powerful enough to run it anyway they also stubbornly ignored that
consumer sentiment was rapidly shifting toward favoring touchscreens over
physical buttons including on the business side so all of this meant that
blackberry went from controlling over 40 percent of the american smartphone
market in late 2009 to
zero in 2016. that's right my friends
blackberry the company has stopped making their own phones all together now
the blackberry name is still around and the flavor of Android that current
blackberry phones run is still being worked on by blackberry but long gone is
blackberry's custom-built mobile operating system and the phones you see
on the market are actually made by other companies under licensing agreements for
the name don't feel too sad for blackberry though i tried one once and
it was honestly wonderful it was both tart and sweet at the same time i hear
it's absolutely fantastic in pies just not as good as apple
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even if you're doing it on your blackberry
it's nothing like it's all good you know it's still cool
we want black blackberry viewers too all
six of you