By this point, RIM had phones in every price segment – from cheap and affordable phones to more premium, flagship models.īut the key with BlackBerry phones, back then, was that they all delivered the same software and features. RIM’s brand was helped in no small way by a slew of celebrities, including Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian, that helped propel the appeal of BlackBerry phones to an even wider audience of users. During this time, RIM’s BlackBerry App World also grew 500% year on year, although it still only had around 17,000 apps (more on this later, though). On top of this, RIM also managed to gain 36% of the Christmas sales, with over 500,000 sales for the period. Take this report from GFK in 2010: BlackBerry handsets accounted for 28.2% of all smartphone sales in 2010. Once BlackBerry started going after consumers too, things really started to take off… And most of RIM’s initial surge in growth was powered by business users.
Helped in no small part by the fact that ALL BlackBerry phones had physical QWERTY keyboards, RIM’s mobile business grew and grew, dwarfing its competitors and making brands like Nokia fret about their market share. But not quite as well as BlackBerry, as RIM really dived deep on the BlackBerry’s email capabilities in order to make it the benchmark by which all other mobile devices were compared. Prior to this, you needed to be at a work station or on your laptop. In the mid-2000s, BlackBerry essentially brought on-the-go-email to the masses.
The company’s presence grew, mostly powered by businesses looking to improve the productivity of their workforces, and by the close of the mid-2000s, BlackBerry was not only the biggest phone brand on the planet but it was also one of the fastest-growing businesses on the market. The Dawn of The Crackberry…įrom 2000 onwards, BlackBerry released a slew of phones, each building on from the last, adding in new features, improved specs, and better technology. The BlackBerry 957 quickly became the darling of corporate America, thanks to its rock-solid encryption and ability to email (and, therefore, work) on the go and at home. And its big draw was that it was internet-connected, totally secure, AND it could do push email. In 2000, BlackBerry released its first mobile phone, the BlackBerry 957. During this period of time, RIM secured a number of patents, developed technologies (push email, for instance), and began amassing a legion of developers and creative minds to help push it forwards. Called Research In Motion (RIM), the company specialized in modems and pagers. From 1984 To The First BlackBerry PhoneīlackBerry was originally founded in 1984. And this is where BlackBerry got its start. We didn’t have iPhones and we didn’t have Android phones. It was a markedly different place back then. In order to answer that question properly, we first need to look back at what was happening in the market when BlackBerry first started to gain traction. So what the hell happened? How did a company as innovative and important as BlackBerry fail? In 2009, it was once named as one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet and, just 11 years later, it no longer even makes phones. In the not too distant past, before Android and iPhones, BlackBerry was king of the phone market. Once the fastest-growing company on earth and the biggest phone maker on the planet, BlackBerry’s fall from grace was one of the biggest nosedives by a phone brand in smartphone history…
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