The Coolest Cell Phone of its Time

When we think about Blackberry and what happened to them, it's like a big oopsie. It's like when something that lots of people use like suddenly goes away really quickly. It can make us feel a little embarrassed or even scared. A long time ago, people thought Blackberry cell phones were really cool and fancy. But that was a while ago before you were born. That's how I saw it, and I think many people feel the same way. It had a special look with a big keyboard, which made it really cool.

This is how they got their special name. The buttons on the old Blackberry phones were spread out and shaped like a slanted oval. They looked a lot like the little circles on a real blackberry fruit. And it's a word that sounds fast and strong with those strong "b" sounds, so it goes well with what they want to show. This phone was really important for people who worked in business. It changed how they did their work because they could send emails and, later on, use Blackberry Messenger.

A Celebrity Favourite

Some very famous people, like Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and President Barack Obama, used special phones called BlackBerry. He was the very first president to have a special phone called a BlackBerry. A long time has gone by, and nobody else has fallen asleep and forgotten things like you did. He's saying that we can see how much these phones have gone down by looking at how many were sold each year, and it's not good.

From Research in Motion to Blackberries

The Blackberry phone was made by a company called Research in Motion. They had a funny name for a long time. In 2013, the company decided to give themselves a new name, Blackberry. This happened when not as many people liked their BlackBerry phones anymore. The person who started Research in Motion was named Mike Lazaridis. When he was a little older than you, he moved with his mom and dad from a place called Turkey to a different place called Canada. That's why Research in Motion is a company from Canada, but they became really popular in a different place called the United States.

The Early Days of Research in Motion

A long time ago, when he was 23 years old, he stopped going to school for electricity stuff because he wanted to make a company with his friend Doug. They were friends for a long time, and they went to school together. That company didn't know what it wanted to do at first, so it just did different engineering jobs. They made a special thing for a big car company called General Motors. They got a lot of money, $600,000, to make a special light-up sign that showed words to the people who make things in a factory.

The Rise of Blackberry

One rainy day, they made an agreement with a company called Rogers, which helps people talk on the phone. They did something special to help with sending messages. They started making things that let people talk to each other without any wires. They made special devices that could send and receive messages using radio waves. In 1997, they made a special pager that you could play with and talk to. It was a special device that let you get and send messages without any wires. In just one year, the special beepers became the most important thing for their work.

The Birth of the Blackberry Device

In 1998, a company called Research in Motion asked people to give them money (raised capital through listing). Lots of people gave them money—more than $100 million! They needed help to give lots of pagers to people who wanted them. They had a lot of orders and needed more pagers. They made a lot more money that year, more than three times as much as before, and it was over $20 million. But there's even more to come! The next year, something really cool happened. Research in Motion made a special phone called the Blackberry 850. It was their very first one!

Email capabilities on the go

The Blackberry 850 was like a special phone that looked nice. It could send and receive emails because it was connected to the internet wirelessly. Now you can look at and send special messages while you're moving around. Doing that without a computer was really cool and impressive back then. In 2001, there were new phones called the 850 and 857. They looked more like the blackberries we know today. These phones became very popular, and many people started using them instead of the interactive pagers they had before. Even though they looked like phones, they couldn't be used to make calls.

The First True Blackberry Cellphone

The first Blackberry mobile that was really special was called the 5810. It came out in the year 2002. People didn't like that the phone didn't have a microphone or speaker. That's strange because most phones have them. To use that thing, you need to connect a special thing with a speaker and a little microphone. Yes, the thing that you needed was there, but it was not easy to use. It was especially difficult when the phone made noise and you had to quickly find the special thing and connect it in time.

The ultimate phone for business professionals

But when you put together the talking part of the cell phone and the sending messages part of the email, along with helpful things like a calendar and a book with people's addresses, it made a really great phone for people who work in offices. They wanted to get the attention of those people. They put ads in magazines and newspapers that talk about business and technology. They didn't sell a lot to people, but instead sold a lot to companies that gave them to their workers. Some companies make things like computers and other cool gadgets, like Dell. And then other companies help people with their money, like Merrill Lynch.

Breaking into the General Public

As they went along, more and more people started to join them. All the famous people were using them, which made them look really cool. And the BlackBerry Messenger was something that also helped. It was an easy way to talk to other people who had the same kind of phone. If you didn't have one, it means you didn't get to join the talk, and you might have felt sad because you were not included. They made new versions of their things with better stuff inside. They kept the same cool look and made sure you could still send emails and messages like before, which is why people liked them in the beginning.

The Decline of Blackberries

People all over the world were buying more and more things every year until 2010 or 2011. That's when they bought the most things—about 50 million of them! They went down really fast, like sliding on a big hill until they were almost at $1 million in 2016. That year, Blackberry said they wouldn't make phones anymore. They let another company called TCL make the phones instead. But now another company called Onward Mobility gets to be in charge because the other company lost their special permission.

The Downfall of Blackberries

Their best year for money was 2011. In 2011, people had almost 20 billion dollars. That's a lot more money than just a few years ago when they only had one billion dollars. But then, a few years later, the amount of money went back down below one billion dollars again. In 2011, they sold a lot of things, but the problem was that more people were buying iPhones really quickly. In 2011, the iPhone became more popular than them, and things have been getting even worse since then.

The impact of the iPhone

I won't say the iPhone made them go away, but the iPhone played the game differently, and Blackberry didn't know how to play along. Apple and other companies that make phones were doing better than Blackberry because they had more fun things you could do on their phones, like games and other cool stuff. Lots of people liked those phones better. Blackberry didn't change enough, so it didn't get all the people who could have liked it.

The new Blackberry

In 2013, the company realized they were having a hard time, so they made some really big changes to try and make things better. They were going to sell the company completely, but in the end, they got a new name and a new boss instead. In 2016, the people who made BlackBerry phones decided to stop making them. Instead, they started asking other companies to pay them money for using the Blackberry name on their phones. They earn lots of money by making computer programs and keeping things safe from bad people. In 2019, they used a lot of money—more than a billion dollars—to get a special company that makes computers think like people. Yes, they still exist, but now they are much smaller and do things differently.

Conclusion

It's a really silly story. Some companies get really big really fast, like a giant tower, but then they can shrink back down just as fast, like a tower that falls down. Blackberry used to be very popular, but then the iPhone came along, and many people started using it instead. This made Blackberry not as popular anymore. Blackberry didn't change when people wanted different things, so they didn't do well. They used to be really big and important, but now they're not as big and important anymore. The story is like a little lesson that tells us that it's really important to come up with new ideas and change the way we do things when lots of people want something different.

Share Your Blackberry Experience

Did you ever have a special phone called a BlackBerry? Did you have it? When did you have it? Did you use it for work? Tell me in the comments. It's really cool to listen to what different people think about this famous phone brand.