![]() They were, he declared, “bandwidth inefficient.” Unlike BlackBerrys, he noted, iPhones couldn’t lower wireless data costs by compressing web pages. Shortly after the iPhone was released, one senior RIM executive brought up at the end of an interview what he saw as the iPhone’s fatal flaw. It lacked, of course, a physical keyboard. RIM’s executives were initially dismissive of Apple’s offering. In 2011, the company was unable to tell me how many different models it offered for an article in which I described its lineup this way: “There are BlackBerrys that flip, BlackBerrys that slide, BlackBerrys with touch screens, BlackBerrys with touch screens and keyboards, BlackBerrys with full keyboards, BlackBerrys with compact keyboards, high-end BlackBerrys and low-priced models.” In RIM’s efforts to cater to everyone, it gradually attracted almost no one.īy 2011 of course, the iPhone was well established. Its lower priced handsets for consumers, very unlike the ones with which it made its name, were often buggy and unreliable.Īs RIM struggled to figure out what consumers wanted, it tried a something-for-everybody approach. The company, however, would struggle with the much more fickle consumer market. And then, almost overnight, they became a hot consumer product and RIM became an industry giant. More than anything, BlackBerry was selling the idea that the unique network its devices operated through provided absolute security.īlackBerrys, of course, grew in size and gained features like the ability to make phone calls and, eventually, take photos. bosses had to be persuaded that wireless emails could be kept safe from hackers’ eyes. In a time when there was far more anxiety about email security in general, I.T. In the device’s early years, when BlackBerrys were overwhelmingly bought by corporations and government agencies, RIM’s executives clearly catered to the information technology department heads who approved the purchase of the phones en masse, not the phone users themselves. What I didn’t foresee was how important the BlackBerry’s physical keyboard would be to its success, as well as to how it would be used: “The pager’s itty-bitty keyboard, however, will discourage long-winded messaging,” I wrote. Now, of course, I’m happiest skiing where there’s no signal that allows emails, texts and Slack messages to follow me. I took one of those original BlackBerrys cross-country skiing and sent an email from a cabin along the trails just for the sheer novelty of it. (While its functions were limited, adjusted for inflation, the original version of the BlackBerry cost roughly $650.) It was the second-to-last item in a long list appearing in Circuits, The Times’s former weekly technology section, and it described an “E-mail-ready pager” that was roughly the shape of a credit card and ran off a single AA battery. My first BlackBerry article for The Times, published in January 1999, offered little suggestion that the device would turn Research in Motion into Canada’s most valuable corporation and ultimately develop an almost cultish following among users.
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