BlackBerry

BlackBerry (BB) is a discontinued brand of mobile devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry was a two-way pager, Inter@ctive Pager 950, launched in 1999 in North America, running on the Mobitex network (later also DataTAC) and became very popular because of its "always on" state and ability to send and receive email messages wirelessly. The BlackBerry pioneered push notifications and popularized the mobile QWERTY keyboard, which became a trademark feature of the brand. In its early years, the BlackBerry proved to be a major advantage over the (typically) one-way communication of conventional pagers and it also removed the need for users to tether to personal computers. It became especially used in the corporate world in the US and Canada. RIM debuted the BlackBerry in Europe in September 2001, but it initially had less appeal there where text messaging using SMS was more established. With the advancement of cellular technology, RIM released in 2002 the first BlackBerry cell phone, the BlackBerry 5810, that ran on the GSM network and used GPRS for its email and web capabilities. RIM also gained a reputation for secure communications, which led to the US government becoming its biggest customer and making use of BlackBerry services. Following the release of the BlackBerry Pearl in September 2006, as well as BlackBerry Messenger software, BlackBerry began attracting many mainstream consumers outside its traditional enterprise userbase, and was influential in the development and advancement of smartphones in this era. The BlackBerry line was for some time also the leading smartphone platform in the US. At its peak in September 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry services subscribers worldwide. In the following years it lost market mainly to the...