A movie story. And so it was in 2023, when the story of a Canadian phone brand that took the world by storm landed on film in a film that chronicled its rise and fall. We are talking about one of the biggest successes and, at the same time, one of the biggest meltdowns in the tech market, as we said, which has a name as simple as it is nice in Italian. Blackberry, or rather BlackBerry. The brainchild of Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in Ontario, Canada, the brand made its way into the market with early models that were actually evolved pagers, before opening up to telephony in the early 2000s.With models that were as sophisticated as they were beautiful. In short, an industry icon in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The brand’s main feature was simple: to produce efficient small computers for the business sector. But that QWERTY keyboard and the sleek design of its models soon became a must-have for so many, including celebrities. Obama, for example, could not do without it even as US president. But also names like Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham, and so on. Probably also fascinated by BBM. An instant messaging system that was perhaps the first real service within everyone’s reach. All you needed was a BlackBerry and your PIN to chat and communicate with anyone. Long before WhatsApp. In short, the real cool cell phone, before the iPhone, was the BlackBerry.
A story that, at the time, no one could have predicted going downhill. Because what they could not have known from Canada was that Apple, with the iPhone, and, shortly thereafter, Android, would monopolize the market, setting aside the mammoth task of a phone that was beautiful, functional for the times, but soon became obsolete. And that lack of readiness to react to the advent of touch screens and new operating systems quickly led the company to lose ground, eventually abandoning smartphone production to focus on software and cybersecurity.
[📸 IPA, Getty Images 📹 TikTok: mobijunk]
