There was a time when BlackBerry reigned as the king of smartphones and peaked in 2011 with over 50 million units sold. He was part of a Canadian telecommunications company called Research in Motion that had millions of customers. The company started out making pagers and handsets, but it took 15 years to take shape into the smartphone that came with the iconic keyboard.
Ruled over 50% of the US smartphone market
At one point BlackBerry controlled 50% of the smartphone market in the US and 20% globally, and BlackBerry phones were everywhere. But after some time the demand dropped sharply and in 2016 BlackBerry stopped making its phones. So what happened? That overnight the rule of the company which was at the top came to an end.
In 1984, two Canadian engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fragin, formed Research in Motion. At first, the company worked mostly on similar projects, including an LED system for GM, a local network for IBM, and film-editing systems. But the tide turned when, in 1989, Canadian phone company Rogers contracted RIM to do the work. The company created its Mobitex network system, which was specifically designed for messaging. RIM then became known as an early specialist in mobile messaging.
First two-way pager made in 1996
In 1996, RIM produced its first two-way pager. And for the next few years, the company iterated on that design, introducing different color options, adding features like WiFi, quick messages, and web browsing.
first model in 2002
In 2002 the company introduced its first model that could be called a phone. In 2006, RIM added a trackball so users could scroll around the screen. Blackberry came with a simple design, easy learning process. With its help, users could email, reply to texts, browse the web.
Blackberry Messenger (BBM) was the most special features
The BBM messaging service was a key element of BlackBerry’s success, as the company realized early on that people wanted to connect very quickly. They want to be able to send messages back and forth without limitation. Being enabled in BBM was BlackBerry-only users, in that these messages could only be sent between BBM users.
Why the decline?
The introduction of the iPhone didn’t affect BlackBerry’s market, but the iPhone was something consumers had never seen before. The iPhone was a full-touch-screen device, and it was a huge leap in innovation for the mobile industry at the time. Blackberry was still using physical keyboards at that time. Blackberry didn’t see the iPhone as competition because it didn’t cater to the business market. RIM released the BlackBerry flip phone in 2008, followed shortly by the BlackBerry Storm, its first touch-screen device. The Storm was reviewed and criticized by critics. But Blackberry phones are still selling for some reason because the iPhone was more expensive than the Blackberry.
But the smartphone market was changing rapidly, with a new updated iPhone coming out every year, and other smartphones like the Motorola Droid in line. The June 2010 release of the iPhone 4 heralded the end of the BlackBerry. Soon after its release, sales of Apple’s phone overtook that of BlackBerry for the second time. But this time he stayed there. RIM’s global market share began to decline, from 20% in 2009 to less than 5% in 2012. By the time RIM released its specialized touch-screen phone in 2013, it was too late.
BlackBerry was named in 2013
In the same year, RIM officially changed its name to BlackBerry. Blackberry thought that its loyal customers would wait for it. But people were moving to either iPhone or Android. And in the last quarter of 2016, only 207,900 of the more than 432 million smartphones sold worldwide were BlackBerry devices, officially reducing RIM’s smartphone market share to 0%.
TCL bought the BlackBerry phone brand in 2016
In 2016, Chinese consumer-electronics company TCL bought the BlackBerry phone brand. The deal was for TCL to design and manufacture the BlackBerry hardware, while the BlackBerry company would provide the software. Today’s Blackberry phones still have the Iconic keyboard but run on Android. The latest Blackberry phone, the Key2, was released in 2018. These days, there’s a new model every year, and 2019 didn’t bring any new BlackBerrys. Now there is no guarantee whether a new Blackberry phone will come or not.