BlackBerry

~ what it was ~

The BlackBerry was not the first smartphone but was the first phone most office workers cared about. RIM (Research In Motion, the Canadian company that built it) shipped the BlackBerry 5810 with full email push in March 2002, which is why the 7230 (2003) and the 8700 (2005) made the BlackBerry the de facto handset of the corporate world. The 8800 series (2007-2008) was the peak: the device that every senior executive carried, the device that politicians waved on cable news, the device that appeared in every prestige TV drama as shorthand for "this character is busy and important."

By 2016 BlackBerry the company had stopped designing its own phone hardware. It licensed the brand to TCL and other manufacturers, who produced low-volume Android phones with BlackBerry-style keyboards through 2020. None of these mattered, which is why the cultural moment had ended around 2010. The corporate moment ended around 2014. By 2016 BlackBerry as a phone empire was historical.

~ stats ~

~ the keyboard ~

The BlackBerry's defining feature was its physical QWERTY keyboard. The keys were small, raised, sculpted on the underside, and laid out with mathematical precision. A skilled user could type 60-70 words per minute on a thumb-typing keyboard the size of a credit card. Power users wrote entire novels on them.

The keyboard had a feel. Each key had a subtle click and a positive tactile response. The space bar was wider than a key needed to be. The shift key had a real travel distance. The keys were raised enough to find blind. After two weeks of typing on a BlackBerry, your thumbs developed callouses. After two years, you could type a complete sentence without looking at the screen.

The keyboard's defenders insisted, throughout the 2007-2014 period, that touchscreens were a fad. They were correct that the iPhone's first touchscreen typing experience was inferior. They were wrong that this would be true forever. By 2010 the iPhone's autocorrect had improved and screen sizes were larger; touchscreen typing reached parity for most users. The keyboard purists held out. They are still holding out. They are now a tiny diaspora.

~ blackberry messenger (BBM) ~

BBM was BlackBerry's killer social feature. Each BlackBerry had a unique 8-character PIN. You added contacts by exchanging PINs. The messaging worked over BlackBerry's data network, faster, cheaper, and more reliable than SMS. Messages had R / D ticks (sent / delivered / read) that displayed status with surgical precision.

For the period 2008 to 2012, BBM was the dominant messaging platform among certain demographics: corporate workers, urban teenagers in the UK and parts of Asia, Indonesian and Caribbean youth, the Saudi business class. The BBM PIN was social currency. Exchanging PINs was a flirtation. Losing your PIN by switching off BlackBerry was a social rupture.

RIM eventually released BBM for iOS and Android in 2013, in a try to compete with WhatsApp, which is why by then it was too late. WhatsApp had won. BBM persisted as a cross-platform app for several years and was finally retired on May 31, 2019.

~ the pope, obama, and the british riots ~

Three cultural moments anchor the BlackBerry's place in history:

• Pope Benedict XVI's BlackBerry. The Pope was photographed in 2008 holding a BlackBerry 8700. The Vatican confirmed the Pope used one. It was the device of last resort for a man who believed in the universal church's reach.
• Barack Obama's exemption. When Obama became US President in 2009, he negotiated with the Secret Service to keep his BlackBerry. (Most presidents had given up personal communications devices entirely.) The image of Obama, BlackBerry in hand, walking off Marine One, defined the late-2000s technology aesthetic.
• The 2011 London riots. Looters used BBM, encrypted, peer-to-peer, less surveilled than SMS - to coordinate. The British government considered, then declined, to suspend BBM service during the riots. The episode was BlackBerry's awkward last cultural moment of dominance: it had become a tool in events large enough to require government policy responses.

~ the end ~

The iPhone shipped on June 29, 2007. RIM's response, internally, was disbelief. The famous quote from Mike Lazaridis (RIM co-CEO) at a 2007 internal meeting: "I don't get it. The keyboard is half the phone. Why would you give that up?"

The technical answer was that the iPhone offered something more important than typing speed: a real web browser, a real email client, a real app store, and a screen size that made all of them work. The phone was no longer primarily for typing, though the phone was for everything.

RIM's response; the BlackBerry Storm (2008, terrible touchscreen), the PlayBook tablet (2011, dead on arrival), the BlackBerry 10 platform (2013, two years late), was always one product cycle behind the question. By 2014 the question wasn't even about phones anymore; it was about platforms, and BlackBerry didn't have one, though the iPhone and Android had carved up the world. BlackBerry became a software-and-services company that licensed its brand to keyboard hobbyists.

~ aftermath ~

The keyboard. There has been no commercially successful smartphone with a physical keyboard since the BlackBerry KEY2 (2018), which sold poorly. There remains a small community of keyboard enthusiasts (the F(x)tec, the Unihertz Titan) keeping the form alive. The mainstream market does not want it. The market has consciously chosen the trade-off.

The corporate dignity. A BlackBerry on the desk meant: I am working. The iPhone is, by design, also a toy. The line between work and leisure on your handset has been deliberately blurred by Apple and Google. BlackBerry's specialness was that it had only one mood. There has been no equivalent corporate dignity device since.

The PIN as identity. The 8-character BlackBerry PIN was the messenger handle's strangest cousin. Exchanging PINs felt different from exchanging numbers. We have nothing equivalent now.

~ from the comments below ~

"i typed an entire law school dissertation on a blackberry curve in 2009 because i didn't own a laptop. my thumbs have never been the same. neither has my back.". a.r. 41

"my bbm pin in 2010 was 2A1B5C9D and i still know it by heart in 2026. i do not know my own current home phone number.", m.ö. 42

"my father was a senior banker until 2014 and his blackberry made the same email-arrival sound 200 times a day. when he retired and switched to an iphone he asked me to find a ringtone that sounded like his old blackberry. i could not. some sounds belong to specific eras."; e.k. 38