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what was the height of cool before the iphone hit the scene in 2007.

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maybe for you it was busting out your motorola razor at

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warped tour but for a lot of others it was actually the blackberry but beyond

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the botanical name and an addictiveness that led observers to call it the

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crackberry the blackberry was actually a very different kind of smartphone from

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what we're used to today it was actually initially marketed to business people as

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an alternative to lugging around the slow heavy laptops of the late 1990s and

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early 2000s in fact blackberry employees

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even gave the devices a way for free trials to people that they saw using

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laptops encouraging them to give the blackberry a try because it was an

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always connected device that would instantly notify the user if they got a

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new email now because email was quickly becoming a preferred method of

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communication for businesses a device with push email notifications as well as

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an ergonomic full qwerty keyboard that made typing significantly easier than on

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other handheld devices caught on pretty quickly remember guys

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this was before touch screen technology became widespread and although cellular

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data speeds at the time were very slow

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sending and receiving a few lines of text in an email didn't require much

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bandwidth so suddenly there was this device that was much more convenient

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than either a laptop or a palm pilot

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which for the earlier models had to be synchronized manually with your pc so

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blackberries quickly found their way into the hands of executives and

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politicians everywhere not just for email but also to keep their personal

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information safe thanks to the additional encryption of blackberry

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messenger compared to traditional sms instant messaging this set the stage for

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the company to keep expanding and eventually release a very successful

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line of devices that we would recognize today as true smartphones albeit still

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with the full physical keyboard that became one of blackberry's signature

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features and then the iphone hit the scene and it

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didn't take long for the blackberry to fade away into obscurity

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but why was this just a result of hype from

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apple's flashy advertisements with

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white earphones well it turns out that while that may

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have been a factor blackberry also missed some key indicators about where

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the industry was headed when the iphone was announced blackberry was still

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growing by leaps and bounds and they didn't see the point in trying to

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compete with a device that they viewed as something for younger less serious

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consumers and to boot the blackberry execs assumed that cell networks simply

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wouldn't be able to keep up with how much data the iphone was designed to

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send and receive instead blackberry decided to keep

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selling primarily to business users that wanted a secure platform and honestly it

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kind of seemed to make sense at the time as this was exactly the formula that

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vaulted blackberry to their position as a major player on the phone scene

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however business users were much more easily wowed by the iphone and later

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Android phones as well than blackberry anticipated not only did the touchscreen

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centric design of competing phones have more futuristic sex appeal iOS and

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Android were more open platforms in that apple and google designed them

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specifically with third-party developers in mind that could release thousands of

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apps to expand their device's functionality blackberry on the other hand continued

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to rely on first party apps at least in part because it still thought of its

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phones as just that phones rather than the do-it-all devices

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that now dominate the market the death knell though didn't come until

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companies started figuring out that the more consumer-focused iphones and

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Android phones that their employees already owned were just as capable as a

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blackberry if not more so so at that

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point turns out businesses just love saving money

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who knew right they generally started having their employees bring those to work and use

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them for that too instead of investing in a fleet of blackberries

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and i mean there were other missteps too remember how controversial apple's

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decision to dump adobe flash was well although it was inconvenient at the

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time apple was ultimately correct that the mobile industry would move away from

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it which you can learn more about here by the way blackberry on the other hand continued

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to make supporting flash a priority even though the hardware inside their phones

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wasn't powerful enough to run it anyway they also stubbornly ignored that

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consumer sentiment was rapidly shifting toward favoring touchscreens over

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physical buttons including on the business side so all of this meant that

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blackberry went from controlling over 40 percent of the american smartphone

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market in late 2009 to

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zero in 2016. that's right my friends

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blackberry the company has stopped making their own phones all together now

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the blackberry name is still around and the flavor of Android that current

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blackberry phones run is still being worked on by blackberry but long gone is

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blackberry's custom-built mobile operating system and the phones you see

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on the market are actually made by other companies under licensing agreements for

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the name don't feel too sad for blackberry though i tried one once and

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it was honestly wonderful it was both tart and sweet at the same time i hear

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it's absolutely fantastic in pies just not as good as apple

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Techquickie to get 10 percent off your first purchase we're gonna have that

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linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos

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leave a comment with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow

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even if you're doing it on your blackberry

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it's nothing like it's all good you know it's still cool

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we want black blackberry viewers too all

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six of you