BlackBerry Cell Phones

BlackBerry is a Canadian company known as RIM (Research In Motion) for 2013. The company was founded in 1984 by, among others, Mike Lazaridis who, together with Jim Balsillie, led the company to great heights until 2012. Like many other telecom manufacturers, it was not able to adapt quickly enough to changing market conditions and almost collapsed.

BlackBerry history

In the first years RIM mainly developed business communication products such as modems and payment terminals. The first consumer products came in 1995 with a modem plug-in card for laptops and the Inter@ctive Pager from 1996. Especially that pager turned out to work because short messages could be sent and received. The pagers were immediately equipped with a full keyboard and thus differed from the traditional pagers with which only messages could be received.

In 1999, RIM announced its first BlackBerry product; the BlackBerry 850. The device was able to receive e-mails from a Microsoft Exchange Server thanks to the in-house developed BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server). The first phone was the BlackBerry 957 from April 2000. It ran BlackBerry OS and relied heavily on BES to receive business emails. Many more telephones and phone series would follow, mostly sharing the same philosophy.

The first problems arose in 2011. The rise of Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Windows Mobile had not led to adjustments such as improved touchscreen support. And because iOS and Windows Mobile were also supported for business applications such as Exchange, customers started switching. The company said goodbye to its founders and switched to BlackBerry 10 which was based on a new operating system; QNX. In the meantime, telephones have become increasingly powerful and energy efficient, making services such as BES and BIS unnecessary. The revenue stream dried up and in 2013 BlackBerry put itself up for sale.

A sale was eventually abandoned but large grounds for dismissal were unavoidable. In 2013, John Chen was appointed to put things in order. One of the changes was that BlackBerry itself would no longer make phones. Nowadays it leaves that to others including TCL, Merah Putih and Optiemus Infracom. They're allowed to market phones under the BlackBerry name. This new strategy is bearing fruit; the company is now writing black figures again.

BlackBerry series

The current product range of BlackBerry phones is many times smaller than it has ever been. At that time, the company frequently released models in the Bold, Curve and Pearl series. No new models will be released in the Q and Z series running under the QNX platform. Nowadays we have the following series;

• DTEK - Consumer phones with large touch screen
• KEY - Business phones with full keyboard

Abroad, especially in India and Indonesia, BlackBerry is still quite popular. There you will also find the Evolve series made by Optiemus. However, these entry-level models are not released worldwide and therefore you won't find them here.

Porsche design

BlackBerry had a long collaboration with Porsche's design studio. This resulted in a number of Porsche design versions of existing BlackBerry models. In terms of appearance, these differed through the use of clean lines and premium materials. The result was a very expensive price tag. With the decline of BlackBerry's popularity, the Porsche collaboration also came to an end. Meanwhile, the car builder makes special telephone versions for Huawei.