I live in Waterloo where blackberry was founded, they made our city a huge tech hub. They're not really talked about anymore but our city is huge in tech and is home to a lot of tech start ups which I think blackberry contributed too.
I owned a blackberry when I was in high school. Most of my friends had one too. It wasn’t for business, it was a status symbol. The iPhone ended up taking over that lane.
In my country, both the Blackberry and the iPhone were a status symbol. The Blackberry showed that you probably had a person who worked at a big/multinational company, whereas the iPhone basically told everyone that your parents were rich. Eventually though, they were both overtaken by Samsung when it released its Galaxy line.
The thing you miss about the physical keyboard is that it wasn’t easily adaptable to other languages that had other alphabets or symbol structures. They actually had to build different hardware for different global markets. This is where the iPhone and eventually android devices killed them….new keyboards were just a touch of a button away.
I'm glad I read through the comments because it turns out, I wasn't the only one having the same experience with my old man lmao He thought it was such a cool thing! And at the time, it totally was.
Doesn't this still exist? I don't know about the US, but in European countries it's very common to sign a 2-year contract with your carrier and once it's close to its due date, you'll suddenly be getting all types of deals and promotions on replacing your phone with a newer model. Also, if by whatever reason you "threaten" them by saying you'll find another carrier as soon as your contract ends, you also magically get new deals like a new phone even though your contract is not even halfway through those 2 years or maybe even a small deduction from the cost of your monthly plan. They didn't really scrap multi-year contracts to make you loyal, they just changed tactics.
Hello, we have been trying to contact you to inform you the extended warranty on your car is about to expire. To extend your car's extended warranty, press three to talk to a representative. I've received this exact recorded message everyday for the last year and if you talk to representative and tell them to stop calling it's useless because English is a third language to these people and they're obviously just reading from a script!
I had a blackberry in 2007 as a college student and a young army officer. I was one of the verizon people who couldn't get an iphone and was generally opposed to Apple for a variety of reasons. The blackberry served my needs well enough, but it was pretty inflexible and aside from calls and emails it just didn't do much. I ultimately swapped to a different flip phone style a couple of years later when I got back from a deployment and my blackberry was super outdated. The blackberry just didn't have enough practical value to justify its cost. Then, a few years later a company I worked for gave me an iPhone as a company phone. I got hooked on Apple and have been with them ever since. I had the 5 for work, then got a 5s for personal use, then got a 7, then an Xr and now a 13 pro max. If Blackberry had been in the game with my employer, I might have been 'recaptured' as a customer, but by then they were dying their slow death.
Blackberry's strength was the security of it's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. That's the main reason so many companies and governments stayed with them so long.
Yes I've heard that Black Berry was tight on security. Google is a snitch machine for the local robbers lol 😆 you throw yourself under the bus with any Judge with Google snitch machine transcripts 😭💀💀💀💀
@@russellhltn1396 Not the requirement but the fact they had released the freaking masterkey for their encryption which basically rendered their damn infrastructure worthless.
Blackberry is still doing well. It has partnered with Amazon and baifu and Nvidia to provide security and they are impeded in 195 million vehicles on the road.
I remember my dad telling me that his colleague could connect to his printer wirelessly and print stuff from his BlackBerry and we were both super impressed at the time.
I had a couple of Blackberry's including the Curve, one had the round trackball and the other had a square track pad. The one with the round trackball was my favorite phone of all time. It was heavy duty and durable. I owned a business and got one for my asst manager. It was a great phone, great messenger, just an awesome tool. They were referred to as "Crackberry's" as they were addictive, although strangely, people nowadays are actually addicted to their phones. I miss my old Blackberry.
I would love a brand new Blackberry with a QWERTY, high def screen, 4gb or greater ram and a fast processor. But, I want it to be built like the original curve models! They never felt cheap and survived multiple drops.
I remember having a blackberry in high school. This was around 2010 or so. I DEFINITELY wasn’t doing business shit, but a fuckton of texting and networking.
@@donnovandalusong266 Yes! I can't believe how many times I dropped it and it ran like a champ! I miss my BB! Although, my mom was so happy when I finally had to get rid of mine because she couldn't stand the clicking from the keyboard. Lol!
Kinda? They were popular for the early adopters of PDA devices, but they were expensive compared to regular phones. Now, nearly every phone is a smartphone, so I wouldn't really make the comparison.
I owned a blackberry curve from 2011 to 2013. The first thing that bothered me was the switch to a trackpad that wasn’t always responsive the way the older trackball had been. Then, after I purchased an iPod touch, it became rapidly clear that blackberry’s OS was rapidly falling behind. In 2013, I switched to an iPhone 5S and have had iPhones ever since. I still miss the full keyboard (I could type so quickly and accurately), but there was just so much that fell behind and never recovered.
im from the city that rim was founded in and i remember in elementary school everyones parents worked there and then they fired a shit ton of ppl and everyone was freaking out because their parents lost their jobs
I live in Rochester.. the rise and fall of Kodak and Xerox. And fall again. And fall again. The entire region is based on people who lost their jobs over the last 75 years hahah
When I was in advertising, BlackBerry was my client. This was 2013. I remember very clearly being told in a meeting by their c-suite that they are not at all concerned about the iPhone and their business in future proof, and we should stay focused on their newest initiative... their new "creative director" Alicia Keys. The iPhone didn't kill the BB - their management did.
Same for Motorola. When Chris Galvin took over for his father, he lacked any vision, and Motorola tanked. One could blame the dot com bubble bursting, but that doesn't explain why Qualcomm and Cisco (amongst others) are still around.
I would agree with that, but also add that when Apple released iPhone, Lazaridis acquired one and dissected it. As I heard it, after evaluating its use of the network (BlackBerrys were also famous for being very frugal with what at the time were significant limits on cellular network bandwidth, as all traffic, including browser/web traffic, was compressed…which gave us the BlackBerry browser with all its warts) he declared that it would crush the network…and it did. AT&T spent multiple millions upgrading their network, especially in the larger markets, where the overwhelming presence of the iPhone would result in delays, dropped calls and other issues, on not just with iPhones but all the other devices. iPhone today is still a bandwidth hog.
I worked at AT&T when the iPhone 3g, 3GS, and 4 all came out and the company directive at the time was “push the iPhone no matter what”. If someone came in and specifically said they wanted a BlackBerry it was my job to do everything in my power to try and switch them to an iPhone or be reemed by management. I’d have to imagine that had something to do with the fast decline as well.
Spot on. At&t used to be a huge blackberry provider & seller. When the iPhone came out, I feel they were pushed by Apple to push people from BlackBerry to I phone. The problem is the iPhone doesn't have a keyboard & BlackBerry people want a keyboard. Ultimately the got at&t to kick BlackBerry off their network, which happened last year and led me to switch to mobile so I could keep my blackberry with a keyboard.
My wife bought a BlackBerry Priv, because she liked the physical keyboard and Android. But the phone itself was troublesome, often getting stuck in a reboot loop. it didn't last long.
And getting hot as hell when the apps demanded more processing power ( Pokemon go for instance) But I still miss my Priv and especially android with physical keys.
Apple: We've put our experience of years of making use friendly computers and music players into this device. Google: We've leaned into our vast pool of software engineers and partnered with proven hardware manufacturers to come up with multiple devices. Blackberry: What if you had to click really hard on the screen?
I feel like the only people who use Apple are rich f*cks, hipsters or my 57 year old mom who likes her phones to be simple because she'll instantaneously combust if she sees a single windows command prompt 🤣
BB also had the back end enterprise server infrastructure they licensed. Full encrypted messaging/email, something that no smart phone could do at the time. This is why government and enterprise did not ditch BB for many years after iphone launched.
As far as consumers, I think that was part of their downfall. A BB device required a server to support it. If an executive wanted their email on a BB, then the IT department either had to set up a BB server or contract out for that service. A smart phone isn't tied to any particular email service or server. In that respect, BB was more of a walled garden than Apple.
I had a BB when I started working as a professional. It was a status symbol. I remember being impressed by the senior people who had work-provided BBs. I shifted when I learned that BB would never have an app store on par with its competitors. They couldn't make the leap from professional to dual use.
from what i recall there wasn't much of one to join initially. one problem was that Bbery devices used their own proprietary (DataTAC?) network technology to do the encrypted email/text and it made any kind of shift to normal (GSM?) cell networks very expensive b/c they'd be abandoning their legacy backbone. basically, they had a short window in which to decide how drastically they needed to change, and they waffled until it was too late.
@Tong Zou yes they waited way too long to integrate to the newer smartphone functionality. Its a shame because i owned the Bold and the world edition. Loved those phones.
@Tong Zou It didn't help things that BB's version of Android was a resource hog, and that the bootloaders were locked, and that they barely got any OS upgrades
@Tong Zou I'd go one step further and say BB10 was a great OS. It was secure, performed well and had an outstanding gesture system. The problem was a lack of dedicated software support and half-baked Android app compatibility. I loved my Passport and would still be using it had BlackBerry released an Android version.
This couldn't have come at a better time. Taking my beloved doggo to get fixed later, and I desperately needed something else to focus on. Thanks Company Man, for giving us consistent, solid content!
Apple isn’t going anywhere until it loses popularity in the West. Currently the mindset is if you don’t have an apple product you are considered inferior. I’ve experienced this many times when I use to have a galaxy. I loved my galaxy s3 and s5 but eventually caved and switch to the iPhone 7 in college and now the iPhone 12 last year.
FxTec Pro 1 X, Unihertz Titan, Planet Computers Astro Slide, eventually the actual new BlackBerry...you've got plenty of options available today, and they all have Android compatibility so you're missing out on nothing by choosing it over a bland full touchscreen phone.
My one cousin had her Blackberry from whe. It first came out until a couple years ago. It had been dropped. Beer. Pop. Water. Everything spilled on it. Tue camera stopped working. The trackball stopped working. But sue kept using it. Sue finally bought a new cell. I told her to get a hold of blackberry and send them the pic of the cell. And tell them yer story of the cell. Tuey Probly would want to have that and maybe send her a brand new one. She had her blackberry for yrs. Even when ppl told her to upgrade. She wouldn’t. She doesn’t like todays cells because of touch screens. She likes the buttons. But she’s now used to tue new cell. I think she just didn’t like change. Must run in the family cause in the same way lol. Love yer channel. Learning a lot why a lot of these places or companies closed down.
@@jeffs4020 it was interesting watching their decline live while attending UWaterloo and seeing their old office buildings near campus being absorbed by the university
The funny thing is as an Indonesian I remember these things selling way past the point where people start to abandon them globally, they even later released a phone named "Jakarta" like the capital. The sad thing though, I have used 3 Blackberry curves, the Curve 3G got lost before it was even a year old, the Apollo didn't last long enough, then I used up the final breath of my brother's old Curve. To put it, they just didn't last all that long, I finally ditched them and switched to the Nexus 5 mid 2014, where that phone died after 4 years as well *sigh*. Luckily my current Note 9 is doing way better even after 3 years.
I love my Key2. It's as close as I got to my vintage Sidekick2 with functionality for IMs and excellent for PDF managing PC fix tickets. Saves me packing a laptop to access files. Had it replaced in warranty once and want to keep it in active use as long as I can.
Also companies no longer supplying phones to their employees but instead relying BYOD. At first I didn't like the idea myself but now I'd never want to go back to having two phones to carry around.
The BlackBerry was so ubiquitous where I live that everyone still had one as a second phone even though they upgraded to an iphone or Android because everyone still used BBM
For me it was a few years before that as iPhone fever was blasting off in 2012 with the iPhone 4S but I remember being 10 and oooing and awing over the one my Dad got from work.
Thank you for your insightful commentary. I was surprised that you didn’t mention Jim Balsillie’s role in BlackBerry’s demise. Around 2011, he tried Getting an new NHL franchise into Hamilton Ontario. As a result he took his eye off the ball and blackberry started putting out low quality phones which as you mentioned had to be constantly replaced.
I used to do Corporate IT support back in the early to mid 2000's and I've had serval over the years. A Blackberry was the device issued to the IT dept. staff and VP's. It was the first true functional business oriented smart device. They had a decent physical qwerty keyboard, a useful set of productivity apps the OS was inherently secure, it had virtually seamless corporate email integration with Domino or Exchange through BES. And of course later came BBM. The Pearl, Curve and Bold were the best models. They tried to follow the trend and go full touch screen with the Storm which was a flop. Then they tried to return to their roots with with the KeyOne (Android OS combined with an old school Blackberry) Which was decent but by then it was too late for them. I still have most of my old BBs in a drawer with the rest of my vintage cell phone collection. They did however excel at the infotainment interface in my Ford. with the Sync 3 which is way better than Microsoft's glitchy ass Myford touch Sync 2.
Everything is in the apps. Phone is just an app. "Smart phones" are just mini-computers running apps. Third-party apps is the only way to scale the platform and Apple definitely had the edge in this area. Once Android came around, Blackberry (and Nokia) had no hope. Only Microsoft could make a go of it, but there simply isn't room the market for three app platforms that developers have to support.
There is a great book, called "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry" that i would recommend to get a really great look how the company squandered the lead they had at the time.
That book is a must read to have a more complete understanding of what went wrong. "RIM didn't see the iPhone as a threat" is partially true, but an oversimplification. The cellular companies (the non-AT&T ones) were the ones that told RIM execs not to be concerned with the iPhone and to not put any development into a competing multimedia capable device.
I need to check that out. From an outside view (I’m Canadian and BB was a household name) it was all hubris. If you remember when the iPhone came out, Balsilie was more concerned with getting an NHL franchise. My belief, wrongly or rightly, was that RIM was too arrogant and never considered a full screen touch interface to be competitive.
@@wcg66 here's a short video of the author discussing the rise and fall of BlackBerry. BlackBerry Jacquie McNish reveals inside story (Full Interview) m.th-cam.com/video/LNZ8X1h2hIc/w-d-xo.html
Also, I'm still annoyed that RIM failed to provide the Blackberry Priv with both the hardware features and software compatibility that it needed to be properly successful. It was an amazing premise because they managed to fit a portrait qwerty keyboard into a sliding mechanism that wasn't bulky. If I remember correctly, though, it didn't use the standard Google Play Store and it also had some problems with hardware quality control. It's such a shame, because that is precisely the configuration of device that I am most interested in.
Yep - There was a way to "side-load" some android apps, but not all and not by direct download. I did that with my Playbook until it got to the point where the apps that would actually work were just not worth having.
I dont like touchscreen keyboards, I keep my fingers on the keyboard when I type. The biggest reason for BB's decline wasn't the keyboard, it was the apps. The apple apps and then android apps just made their phones more usable than blackberry. By the time blackberry started allowing android apps it was too late.
@Tong Zou that's what I'm referring to. BB10 ran Android apps in a container that was based on an old version of Android. By most accounts, it didn't actually work all that well.
You know blackberry had released an android smartphone with a physical keyboard right? A few years ago, I don’t know why you would want it but if you really care about the keyboard do whatever you want
Most of the people I knew who clung to their BlackBerries even after the brand declined claimed that it was still better for email. I think the reason they had trouble expanding beyond the business environment is because most people don't send a lot of emails outside of work anymore due to the rise of social media.
and apps. Blackberry couldn't compete with the itunes store or google play. Because RIMs hardware and software was so antiquated compared to iOS and Android that developers wouldn't build blackberry apps and RIM did nothing to that alleviate that situation. The RIM CEOs bragged about never touching an iPhone when the iPhone/Android craze started in 2009/2010. The original Droid and iPhone 3GS, and a year or so later the Samsung Galaxy, was the nail in the coffin. That arrogance is what ultimately lead to RIMS demise.
One small story I may add. On the day that Steve Jobs released the podcasts of the iPhone, a General Manager of RIM had to pull his car to the side road and listened to it entirely. When he got to his office later that day he called an urgent meeting with all of his direct managers and issued a statement that summed it up “We are done”.
I think another thing that may have been worth mentioning, even though it didn't turn things around for them, was the Z10 phone BlackBerry released in 2013. It was all touchscreen with a brand new operating system. I read the reviews which were really positive and was planning to buy one as soon as the contract on my old phone was up. But once that happened, it was clear that good or not, NO ONE was buying the new BlackBerries and I'd be buying into a dying ecosystem. Kind of like the Windows phone, it was just too late. It's too bad, because the Z10 looked like a cool phone.
@@ressljs it was, and the z30 was even better simply because of the size. The PRIV was the best of all worlds, full slideout keyboard that would allow you to scroll the full touchscreen simply by rubbing your fingers on the keys without pushing them. Android ecosystem with a full functioning app store. Battery that lasted for DAYS and my absolute favorite feature EVER, the BlackBerry HUB.
The BlackBerry Keyone was released in 2017 and had all the same features as a iPhone 10 with the Iconic physical keyboard but Android based software. I have owned mine for 4 years and is a excellent device.
I went to high school in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. Most folks thought of Waterloo, ON as just a college town, about an hour's drive south of Toronto and home of the prestigious University of Waterloo. The fact that RIM was headquartered there felt like a point of national pride. Here was a grassroots tech company that made it big and put Canada on the world tech market, standing toe to toe against giants like Samsung, Motorola and Apple. They were hometown heroes, and it felt for a time like Waterloo could become Canada's own version of Silicon Valley. And yeah, I had a Blackberry of my own back in high school. It was *the* phone for popular kids to have, and all my friends had one. I begged my parents to get me a Blackberry, any Blackberry, and eventually they gave in and bought me a used Blackberry Curve. One of the coolest phones I ever had tbh. But the cracks started to show when Apple and Android phones started getting better and better with each generation, while Blackberry was still doing the same old thing as always with dwindling app support.
I had that Blackberry Storm for my first smart phone back in 2009 and I absolutely loved it. The "gimmicky" click-able screen was the best thing ever. You almost never clicked on the wrong thing or made a mistake when typing things because it would only register what you clicked down on. I would give anything to have another phone like that. Such a great device
You were lucky. I did third tier support for Verizon back then and the Storm was a giant turd from the tech support standpoint. Tons of them had faulty screens and they wouldn’t “click” correctly.
@@thecrippledrummer that's crazy to hear. I think my storm would probably still work to this day if i charged it. I was a professional cowboy too do I was not easy on phones haha
I used to actually want one of these when I was in middle/high school. Now I'm cool with a Light Phone 2 and am stunned BlackBerry seemingly fell off the map so fast and far
I hated it when my company forced me to move to an iPhone from a Blackberry. I love the thing, and I believe it was more durable than the iPhone that I’ve replaced multiple times since that time.
yeah, same here, especially how big tech is totally spying on us now like 1984 novel type of dystopia. I wish BB10 was still supported even with no apps just to have some privacy
@@TheFalseShepphard Or we could instead have governments create regulations to prevent companies from spying on you. What is this bullshit that blames consumers when companies are being evil?
I owned a BB for business purposes, and in a sense, I still do. Nowadays my BB is just an app on a regular cell phone, but I use it for business emails on the go. The main reason is that most regular email apps out there are not sufficiently secure. I have never heard of a BB email being hacked, and I certainly have never received robo calls or robo emails on my BB. The old hardware was innovative for its time, but it could not compete with all the new apps on an iPhone.
The BlackBerry had such an iconic look - a look no other phone has ever managed to match. Nowadays, phones all look the same and offer the same too. Huge screens, no buttons, apps etc. The only difference is in the cameras, but I prefer using my Nikon and GoPro for pictures and video so it doesn't matter what my phone is packing. I own both a Samsung and an iPhone and they're all the same really. BlackBerry stood out and dared to be different, I actually miss their keyboards, but I also love the huge screens all the other phones have nowadays. Yes, they do all look the same, but they are very functional for watching youtube, reading manga and browsing apps.
I remember when physical keyboards started to go away from cellphones. That was also the time when BlackBerry became less and less relevant. Some of the phones they continue to license today surprisingly still have that signature physical keyboard!
I grew up in the Waterloo area and man... I remember so many buildings were "RIM" Buildings around here back in the day! Pretty much everyone I knew had Blackberries and was on BBM. It used to be a status symbol having over 100 contacts on your BBM list! I do remember those annoying "PING!" messages my boss used to send me through BBM whenever I was ignoring him though... But I fully agree with you, the Blackberry company failed to adapt and keep up with the emerging technologies. I remember one of their last bids for notoriety was supporting Flash content in their Blackberry Playbook (back in like 2011 or something), you know, back when Flash was still somewhat popular, but also on it's way out in favour of HTML5...
Not really, BlackBerry continued growing in popularity years after the iPhone was released. It's more complicated than just the iphone shifting everything.
@@robgronotte1 Exactly. Everyone wants TH-cam to go, but I keep repeating that the only way a model like TH-cam would work, where people also get paid for the content they produce, is to have ads and sponsors. Both of these involve other companies and other companies are going to have standards for what they do and don't want in videos with their names being promoted. Not saying TH-cam is too big to fail as it happens to nearly all companies eventually. But paying people to put up content and cutting out the middlemen who actually have the money to do that on a global scale isn't a very simple process.
blackberry had the chance to release a wholesale worthy competitor, they also had the funding to do so, since they were a lot more established in the phone market, but they didnt. RIP early 2000's you wont be forgotten
Well put and Like titanic they thought they were to big and dominant to do anything against the competition so they came they were hit and rest is history 🤷🏾♂️
I Live in the Waterloo region where research in motion was founded and I remember everybody having a BlackBerry in high school because they were so easy to get in our area
I remember my grandma getting a new blackberry every year because her phone wouldn't last past a year without breaking but it was what she was used to. She used it more as a personal business phone for calling and catching with relatives and friends. Around 2016 she finally changed to a smartphone and she hasn't been happier, plus it doesn't have buttons that easily break lol.
When I was in middle school I had a BlackBerry torch. It was 2009. I loved that phone. I used it so much that the paint around the call buttons were chipped away. I absolutely loved the keyboard.
I got a BlackBerry the summer before my junior year of high school in 2010. I kept it for a year and, interestingly, switched to the iPhone the following summer as the front-facing camera and other features became a must-have. It was interesting to watch this and see that peak in 2011 because it did feel like everyone had one, and then the following school year, it was all about the iPhone, and we were like, BlackBerry, who? I didn't realize the iPhone was AT&T exclusive at first, which makes sense why I didn't have one right away since my family was a Verizon customer.
Blackberry had an amazing design. I keep imagining a cellphone with the appearance of a Blackberry running linux as an operating system, it would be a killer!!
The BB10 OS we created from Linux based system acquired through QNX purchase,was awesome and introduced in Q10 and Z10 devices. It was a very robust OS and unprecedented in how quickly it was fully realized and launched. Unfortunately BB had missed the boat, had no $ to market the launch, and fizzled utterly soon after. Nearly 10K of us lost our fantastic jobs in Waterloo alone. What an utter disaster from management...
nokia was even worse because they actually pivoted and made some really good smartphones with THE best cameras in the market (lumia series) but microsoft screwed them royally. it was a windows phone with no android option, no play store integration so almost no apps at all. imagine having a phone with the best cameras and no ability to use instagram.
I owned a black barry back in 2011 when they were still booming. When I saw the title of the video the nostalgia came flooding back to me about when I owned a blackberry and I have to tell you I prefer the design of the blackberry over any of the other smartphones. Now this is just my own bias point of view when I say I’m tired of the modern smartphones today with Apple and Samsung being the flagships. I just feel as if there is no verity now a days compared to back then. Nowadays you’re really only left with 2 options and it sucks because I remember a time when the smartphone market was more diverse.
Nah, those plastic keyboard was a deal breaker, especially nowadays when people prefer bigger phone screens. There is a reason phones with physical keyboards became obsolete.
That og blackberry with the text pad was the ultimate phone. Good pricing and solid functions. Once they got rid of the keyboard, I never bothered. One of the main complaints I heard was the apps on the new blackberry was limited. They had a app store with very little to offer.
I was surprised when you didn’t mention security. I work in the public sector and after 9/11, security and encryption became paramount and slowed delivery in the rapid development of web applications. As the cell phones were being issued and devices chosen, Blackberry claimed to have full encryption which is processor intensive but appealing at the time. Others were skeptical of the phone’s security capabilities but I never found out who was right. I carried a BlackBerry for several years and was upset to be issued an iPhone.
It doesn't matter now, but there was a period of time when the device unique identifier could be cloned. The device identifier was what enabled the RIM relay to know who to serve to or accept data from, so this was a huge security vulnerability. To RIM's credit, they introduced a further variable used in the key exchange within a few months of me bringing the issue to their attention. Considering the scope of the change and the speed, I'd guess it was all hands on deck to get it delivered that quickly. This is circa 2008, but anyone in the industry could see the writing on the wall by that point, I had a couple of HTC's on User Acceptance Testing and it was apparent that both Win Smartphone and Blackberry OS would be lost one way or another, falling to iOS or Android. We knew that Nokia was doomed when it made it's bed with Win Smartphone after Symbian Series 60 for a similar reason, Symbian had many issues (first widespread phone virus amongst other things), but WinCE through Smartphone was just a dog's dinner in code and UI (though I did think the Communicator was pretty sweet
I had a couple blackberrys from around 2008 to 2011 and they were amazing phones especially the keyboard. I was around 21 or so and it wasn't for business at all and a few of my friends had them too. I ended up changing it for a samsung galaxy s2 it was just better overall with web browsing playing music etc. But I always did miss the physical keyboard. If only blackberry switched to android early on then I think more people would have kept a blackberry or at least tried it out.
I thought it was the end for black berry when I saw the iphone. I couldn't figure out why anyone would still want a black berry when you had a device like an iphone that was so flexible. I think the iPhones biggest selling point was its compatibility with computers as well as apps.
wrong gangsta macc. Not being offered by U.S. carriers any longer and a price point around 6x as much as you could get an iphone through the same carrier is what killed them.
7:52 I don't think that debate was ever finalized, honestly. I typed faster on a physical keyboard, I miss phones that had keyboards that slide out from under the phone horizontally. Sure, it made the phones a bit thicker, but you get a lot more feedback from a physical keyboard than a touch screen. Funny how a "fad" can become the only choice lol.
Well, there is a good reason why physical computer keyboards aren't dead and physical phone keyboards are. The small, cramped, and unchangable physical keyboard of a phone makes it impractical for alot of people who types in other keyboard formats and having all of your characters, signs, and dashes on one single key that needs double-tapping. Which is why physical keyboards on a phone isn't ideal for many.
As an old BB 9000, Q10, and Keyone user, I think the features of the new 5G Blackberry must be the following: Key2-type keyboard, robust frame, long-life quick charging battery, Blackberry Secure Operating System (with compatibility to Google Play apps), clever and ergonomic facilities, Contacts app with more manipulation functions and MS Outlook compatibility (like that of BB Bold 9000). The camera must have a stabilizer, support slow motion, but no need for tons of MB picture resolutions (4K is enough). No need for fancy curved displays. Must have an easy memory insertion slot, stereo speakers (like those fantastic mini ones of BB 9000) as well as programmable notification profiles (like those of BB 9000). The back skin must be soft and leather-like. Finally, the price must not exceed the cheapest iPhone one!!!! This will boost the BB sales, hoping for a victorious come-back.
They just didn't bother to sell blackberry strongest point, the encryption from the phone to the tower and back. It was almost as if they made a deal with the devil in that regard.
The iPhone most definitely killed the Blackberry but going with that business side of things alot of rappers myself included we had blackberries cuz we can write out verses on them with the keypad so they were very big in the hip-hop community
It was a combination of Apple, the new Androids, and the Windows based smartphones. I was a Verizon tech at that time and we even had people still using Palm phones. I used Blackberries until the “Google phone” was released. I used it for a few months then tried an iPhone. Haven’t switched since and that was 2009.
@@paulheap1982 my mommy always told me i was when she put on my helmet and kneepads before school. Speaking of which, you know the windows taste like bacon, right?
I owned a Blackberry Bold in 2009 before switching to iPhone. I bought my Blackberry mid way through my MBA program. A lot of us had one until the realization that we could have an iPhone that not only provided our business needs but also personal and entertainment needs. It made for better synchronization with our Macs as well.
I remembered blackberry when it was at their prime. during 2007-2010, my family used them: My dad, my mom, and my sister would always have their attention glued to the screens. By 2012, they replaced them for iphones as keyboards tend to fail after constant use. Once the iphone 4 was in the market, it was doom for blackberry as they no longer could compete with it...
On a similar note - but not an identical note by any means - I remember being in high school (2008-2009ish) playing so much World of Warcraft my grades began to suffer a little. Everyone told me that was fairly common, which was why some people called it "World of War-Crack" because it was just so addictive. It really is incredible how much technology can overtake your life, whether it be smart phone dependency or video game addiction.
I always wanted a Blackberry back in the day. I thought they were so cool and uniquely designed. That changed when the iPhone came out and wanting a Blackberry was all but a distant memory.
From 2010-2014/2015ish, I had a BlackBerry work phone and a personal phone. It was around 2014 or 2015 that the company I worked for moved to a BYOD model and had people start using their personal phones for company stuff, and we turned in our BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) at that time.
I remember my mother’s blackberry. Any time she took me and my brothers places and needed us to just stay put for a minute she would let us play brick break on her phone.
I agree, BlackBerry was one of those must have devices before smartphones were more economical. My parents and grandparents had them when I was growing up.
I had Blackberry devices from the 957 (this video doesn't mention that the 850 and 857 were replaced by the 950 and 957 models, which operated on the 900Mhz network vs the 800Mhz) up through the Storm from years 2001-ish through 2010. These were for business, but the key that the video left out was the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), which tied into an organization's MS-Exchange or Lotus Notes email system. That's why they were mainly used for business - the original models required connectivity to a BES and a corporate email system. Later, as the devices became more mainstream, they were able to do POP3 or IMAP with any email account, but without all of the security that came with an encrypted connection to a BES.
I live in Waterloo where blackberry was founded, they made our city a huge tech hub. They're not really talked about anymore but our city is huge in tech and is home to a lot of tech start ups which I think blackberry contributed too.
The University is known for its CS programs so I think both UW and Blackberry propelled Waterloo into what it is today.
waterloo also has their own google location which is pretty dope
I too live in waterloo, the silicon valley of the north!
And all the startups moving into the sold BlackBerry campuses.
I too live In Waterloo and waiting for Mennonites to start using blackberry phones
I owned a blackberry when I was in high school. Most of my friends had one too. It wasn’t for business, it was a status symbol. The iPhone ended up taking over that lane.
Yooo if u had a blackberry in school u was the man
In my country, both the Blackberry and the iPhone were a status symbol. The Blackberry showed that you probably had a person who worked at a big/multinational company, whereas the iPhone basically told everyone that your parents were rich. Eventually though, they were both overtaken by Samsung when it released its Galaxy line.
Y’all must be old 😭😂
@@vhj2151 I’m 27
@@movieplug5117 facts!! 😩🤣
Blackberry 2010 known for "multibillion dollar company"
Blackberry 2021known for
"Meme stock"
s T O n K s
I set my Samsung's Bixby button to open the Fidelity app so I can lose money faster.
@@CannabisTechLife I was thinking of doing a Samtime reference. And you beat me while high. Well played.
Diamond hands, folks. Last man holding Blackberry wins.
Even by 2010 I feel like the writing was on the wall: Blackberry is the past, iPhone and Android are the future
The thing you miss about the physical keyboard is that it wasn’t easily adaptable to other languages that had other alphabets or symbol structures. They actually had to build different hardware for different global markets. This is where the iPhone and eventually android devices killed them….new keyboards were just a touch of a button away.
My dad had a blackberry and it was his whole personality for a time😂
Same
I'm glad I read through the comments because it turns out, I wasn't the only one having the same experience with my old man lmao He thought it was such a cool thing! And at the time, it totally was.
that's people with iPhone now lol 😂
It was my personality when I had one I would go back to them if their ecosystem wasn’t an abortion.
i am your dad 😔
Customers weren't loyal to any carrier, we were held captive by them back in the day. Remember the days of mult-year contracts?
Still sucks now but that was truly aweful
Back then jail break was a big deal and came with a lot of baggage, ATT and Apple did not want verizon.
Yeah now we have multi-year phone financing agreements. Yay progress.
Doesn't this still exist? I don't know about the US, but in European countries it's very common to sign a 2-year contract with your carrier and once it's close to its due date, you'll suddenly be getting all types of deals and promotions on replacing your phone with a newer model. Also, if by whatever reason you "threaten" them by saying you'll find another carrier as soon as your contract ends, you also magically get new deals like a new phone even though your contract is not even halfway through those 2 years or maybe even a small deduction from the cost of your monthly plan. They didn't really scrap multi-year contracts to make you loyal, they just changed tactics.
I wonder why that existed? At least we can now switch carriers freely
"these people must've been conditioned to panick Everytime they heard the phone ring"
Oh buddy I got news for u! I can do that without a blackberry
Funny!
Nice
Hello, we have been trying to contact you to inform you the extended warranty on your car is about to expire. To extend your car's extended warranty, press three to talk to a representative.
I've received this exact recorded message everyday for the last year and if you talk to representative and tell them to stop calling it's useless because English is a third language to these people and they're obviously just reading from a script!
Same
the absolute state of gen z
I had a blackberry in 2007 as a college student and a young army officer. I was one of the verizon people who couldn't get an iphone and was generally opposed to Apple for a variety of reasons. The blackberry served my needs well enough, but it was pretty inflexible and aside from calls and emails it just didn't do much.
I ultimately swapped to a different flip phone style a couple of years later when I got back from a deployment and my blackberry was super outdated. The blackberry just didn't have enough practical value to justify its cost.
Then, a few years later a company I worked for gave me an iPhone as a company phone. I got hooked on Apple and have been with them ever since. I had the 5 for work, then got a 5s for personal use, then got a 7, then an Xr and now a 13 pro max.
If Blackberry had been in the game with my employer, I might have been 'recaptured' as a customer, but by then they were dying their slow death.
Blackberry's strength was the security of it's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. That's the main reason so many companies and governments stayed with them so long.
True, but the requirement of the server was likely one of their downfalls.
Blackberry was good when it was secure. The downfall was that they were secure and the DS must be have access to all of your data and devices.
Yes I've heard that Black Berry was tight on security.
Google is a snitch machine for the local robbers lol 😆 you throw yourself under the bus with any Judge with Google snitch machine transcripts 😭💀💀💀💀
@@russellhltn1396 Not the requirement but the fact they had released the freaking masterkey for their encryption which basically rendered their damn infrastructure worthless.
Blackberry is still doing well. It has partnered with Amazon and baifu and Nvidia to provide security and they are impeded in 195 million vehicles on the road.
Blackberry was the ultimate dad phone
And food
And food
doof dnA
And food
And food
I remember my dad telling me that his colleague could connect to his printer wirelessly and print stuff from his BlackBerry and we were both super impressed at the time.
What giant lolcows.
And today I use my phone to control my computer remotley to mess with my brothers.
@@LiteralCrimeRave I didn't know you could do that. How do you connect to the computer?
I had a couple of Blackberry's including the Curve, one had the round trackball and the other had a square track pad. The one with the round trackball was my favorite phone of all time. It was heavy duty and durable. I owned a business and got one for my asst manager. It was a great phone, great messenger, just an awesome tool. They were referred to as "Crackberry's" as they were addictive, although strangely, people nowadays are actually addicted to their phones. I miss my old Blackberry.
Wow, I forgot about that ball that was like a mouse. It was pretty cool.
Blackberry was fantastic, what a shame. They absolutely were the thing to have.
Sike
@@Larhless bruh you are so childish .. I love it 🤣
I would love a brand new Blackberry with a QWERTY, high def screen, 4gb or greater ram and a fast processor. But, I want it to be built like the original curve models! They never felt cheap and survived multiple drops.
BlackBerry wont work after today.
I remember having a blackberry in high school. This was around 2010 or so. I DEFINITELY wasn’t doing business shit, but a fuckton of texting and networking.
This was me too!! I text so much!
Plus its almost as durable as Nokia.
@@donnovandalusong266 Yes! I can't believe how many times I dropped it and it ran like a champ! I miss my BB! Although, my mom was so happy when I finally had to get rid of mine because she couldn't stand the clicking from the keyboard. Lol!
@@PsAMermaid F for your Blackberry 🤧
Careful there. Your Privilege is showing.
Blackberry was THE phone at the time. Comparable to what iPhone is now.
I feel like that was only in North America though. In Finland I had never even heard of it before like 2013.
Kinda? They were popular for the early adopters of PDA devices, but they were expensive compared to regular phones. Now, nearly every phone is a smartphone, so I wouldn't really make the comparison.
Without the top notch security and secure browser. I would like to see a BlackBerry 10 comeback.
Apple is the worst phone out there. Even Motorola is better. Android is where it's always been😊
It wasn’t though. Most people stuck with dumb phones before switching to iPhone and Android
I owned a blackberry curve from 2011 to 2013. The first thing that bothered me was the switch to a trackpad that wasn’t always responsive the way the older trackball had been. Then, after I purchased an iPod touch, it became rapidly clear that blackberry’s OS was rapidly falling behind. In 2013, I switched to an iPhone 5S and have had iPhones ever since. I still miss the full keyboard (I could type so quickly and accurately), but there was just so much that fell behind and never recovered.
im from the city that rim was founded in and i remember in elementary school everyones parents worked there and then they fired a shit ton of ppl and everyone was freaking out because their parents lost their jobs
😐😔
I live in Rochester.. the rise and fall of Kodak and Xerox. And fall again. And fall again. The entire region is based on people who lost their jobs over the last 75 years hahah
I live in waterloo just down the street where there head quarters was just empty lots and buildings now
When I was in advertising, BlackBerry was my client. This was 2013. I remember very clearly being told in a meeting by their c-suite that they are not at all concerned about the iPhone and their business in future proof, and we should stay focused on their newest initiative... their new "creative director" Alicia Keys. The iPhone didn't kill the BB - their management did.
Same for Motorola. When Chris Galvin took over for his father, he lacked any vision, and Motorola tanked.
One could blame the dot com bubble bursting, but that doesn't explain why Qualcomm and Cisco (amongst others) are still around.
I would agree with that, but also add that when Apple released iPhone, Lazaridis acquired one and dissected it. As I heard it, after evaluating its use of the network (BlackBerrys were also famous for being very frugal with what at the time were significant limits on cellular network bandwidth, as all traffic, including browser/web traffic, was compressed…which gave us the BlackBerry browser with all its warts) he declared that it would crush the network…and it did. AT&T spent multiple millions upgrading their network, especially in the larger markets, where the overwhelming presence of the iPhone would result in delays, dropped calls and other issues, on not just with iPhones but all the other devices. iPhone today is still a bandwidth hog.
Also Alicia Keys was caught messaging on an iPhone, so that wasn’t a good look, either.
I worked at AT&T when the iPhone 3g, 3GS, and 4 all came out and the company directive at the time was “push the iPhone no matter what”. If someone came in and specifically said they wanted a BlackBerry it was my job to do everything in my power to try and switch them to an iPhone or be reemed by management. I’d have to imagine that had something to do with the fast decline as well.
That AT&T and iPhone relationship looked more like a cartel.
Wow.
Yup, Apple had draconian contracts with carriers which forced this type of behaviours.
Spot on. At&t used to be a huge blackberry provider & seller. When the iPhone came out, I feel they were pushed by Apple to push people from BlackBerry to I phone. The problem is the iPhone doesn't have a keyboard & BlackBerry people want a keyboard. Ultimately the got at&t to kick BlackBerry off their network, which happened last year and led me to switch to mobile so I could keep my blackberry with a keyboard.
@Shawn that's your opinion. IPhones don't have a keyboard & tbh I hate the iOS operating system. Blackberries run android OS.
My wife bought a BlackBerry Priv, because she liked the physical keyboard and Android. But the phone itself was troublesome, often getting stuck in a reboot loop. it didn't last long.
And getting hot as hell when the apps demanded more processing power ( Pokemon go for instance)
But I still miss my Priv and especially android with physical keys.
@@MeinenNamenSagIchNicht she still wishes she had that physical keyboard too. But her new Fold 4 is keeping her happy.
Apple: We've put our experience of years of making use friendly computers and music players into this device.
Google: We've leaned into our vast pool of software engineers and partnered with proven hardware manufacturers to come up with multiple devices.
Blackberry: What if you had to click really hard on the screen?
Blackberry, "We have the best email, we don't have to be best at anything else".
Samsung Galaxy is a WAY better product than anything Apple can produce!!
I feel like the only people who use Apple are rich f*cks, hipsters or my 57 year old mom who likes her phones to be simple because she'll instantaneously combust if she sees a single windows command prompt 🤣
Apple and user friendly don't belong in the same sentence.
@eeeeee Something that requires extra steps is not intuitive, it’s nuisance.
BB also had the back end enterprise server infrastructure they licensed. Full encrypted messaging/email, something that no smart phone could do at the time. This is why government and enterprise did not ditch BB for many years after iphone launched.
IIRC I think the US DOD still uses BlackBerry's.
@@Deezy07 Really, which branch? I've worked for almost every major DOD agency and there was a huge BB purge around 2014. It's been iPhones ever since.
As far as consumers, I think that was part of their downfall. A BB device required a server to support it. If an executive wanted their email on a BB, then the IT department either had to set up a BB server or contract out for that service. A smart phone isn't tied to any particular email service or server. In that respect, BB was more of a walled garden than Apple.
@@russellhltn1396 it was the servers that killed RIM.
BES sucked to support.
I remember both of my parents having black berries in like 2010 I thought they were so cool. It was my aspiration to have a blackberry when I grew up
Tell them their Blackberry wont work after today.
2022-01-04
I had a BB when I started working as a professional. It was a status symbol. I remember being impressed by the senior people who had work-provided BBs. I shifted when I learned that BB would never have an app store on par with its competitors. They couldn't make the leap from professional to dual use.
If RIM joined the Andriod ecosystem in the 2010s things would be different.
from what i recall there wasn't much of one to join initially.
one problem was that Bbery devices used their own proprietary (DataTAC?) network technology to do the encrypted email/text and it made any kind of shift to normal (GSM?) cell networks very expensive b/c they'd be abandoning their legacy backbone. basically, they had a short window in which to decide how drastically they needed to change, and they waffled until it was too late.
@Tong Zou yes they waited way too long to integrate to the newer smartphone functionality. Its a shame because i owned the Bold and the world edition. Loved those phones.
Yeah - hackable crap like android. I'll take BlackBerry any day and 10 times on Sunday.
@Tong Zou It didn't help things that BB's version of Android was a resource hog, and that the bootloaders were locked, and that they barely got any OS upgrades
@Tong Zou I'd go one step further and say BB10 was a great OS. It was secure, performed well and had an outstanding gesture system. The problem was a lack of dedicated software support and half-baked Android app compatibility. I loved my Passport and would still be using it had BlackBerry released an Android version.
This couldn't have come at a better time. Taking my beloved doggo to get fixed later, and I desperately needed something else to focus on. Thanks Company Man, for giving us consistent, solid content!
The lesson I have learned from Company Man on so many many of these videos is, once the family sells to a corp. it's going to go bad.
Loved my BlackBerry Curve in high school (2010 and 2011). They were too focused on business and didn’t change quickly enough. Great video!
Jimmy Fallon went from 0 to Annoying in 0.7 seconds in his cameo
his fake laugh absolutely makes me mad
I just clicked the video and haven't seen him appear yet but I agree
@@filipmazic5486 same
Apple will be next. Minimal improvements and they feel they are perfect. Their limelight only can last so long.
e
Apple isn’t going anywhere until it loses popularity in the West. Currently the mindset is if you don’t have an apple product you are considered inferior. I’ve experienced this many times when I use to have a galaxy. I loved my galaxy s3 and s5 but eventually caved and switch to the iPhone 7 in college and now the iPhone 12 last year.
I agree. But they need someone to take them out.
@@eligreg99 we get that. The original comment’s point is that limelight doesn’t last forever. Neither will it for Apple.
Get a samsung s20 or s21 ultra wont regret it
Never owned a BlackBerry, but I owned an early Android phone with the sliding keyboard... I miss physical keyboards.
Was it the HTC? I had that one myself. A full Android phone with the flip out keyboard. I loved it.
@@JL-sm6cg Samsung Galaxy 1S
The Blackberry Key2 is an Android Phone with a physical keyboard.
FxTec Pro 1 X, Unihertz Titan, Planet Computers Astro Slide, eventually the actual new BlackBerry...you've got plenty of options available today, and they all have Android compatibility so you're missing out on nothing by choosing it over a bland full touchscreen phone.
I had a Sony Ericson phone with a sliding keyboard, I loved that phone so much.
My one cousin had her Blackberry from whe. It first came out until a couple years ago. It had been dropped. Beer. Pop. Water. Everything spilled on it. Tue camera stopped working. The trackball stopped working. But sue kept using it. Sue finally bought a new cell. I told her to get a hold of blackberry and send them the pic of the cell. And tell them yer story of the cell. Tuey Probly would want to have that and maybe send her a brand new one. She had her blackberry for yrs. Even when ppl told her to upgrade. She wouldn’t. She doesn’t like todays cells because of touch screens. She likes the buttons. But she’s now used to tue new cell. I think she just didn’t like change. Must run in the family cause in the same way lol.
Love yer channel. Learning a lot why a lot of these places or companies closed down.
I want a modern phone with a physical hidden keyboard SOOOO badly. There’s just something about clicking those keys, and I’m 20 y/o
I’m with you on that
Your choices are basically the BlackBerry KEY2 / LE, the F(x) Tec Pro 1, and the Unihertz Titan and Titan Pocket...
@@KBoon I just price checked a few of those 🤯
@@mattberg6816 around about how much?
Now that I googled it I see. Oh dear the price is not low. But when weighed for what it offers...
This is the video noone asked for, but needed the most.
[Generic comment saying how you’re wrong]
Yours is the comment no one asked for, and didn’t need at all.
As a Canadian this hurts... And it honestly seems like people ditched them overnight
iPhone kicked their ass. They should of started just copying the iPhone .
as someone who LIVES in kitchener this really hurts
@@jeffs4020 it was interesting watching their decline live while attending UWaterloo and seeing their old office buildings near campus being absorbed by the university
The funny thing is as an Indonesian I remember these things selling way past the point where people start to abandon them globally, they even later released a phone named "Jakarta" like the capital. The sad thing though, I have used 3 Blackberry curves, the Curve 3G got lost before it was even a year old, the Apollo didn't last long enough, then I used up the final breath of my brother's old Curve. To put it, they just didn't last all that long, I finally ditched them and switched to the Nexus 5 mid 2014, where that phone died after 4 years as well *sigh*. Luckily my current Note 9 is doing way better even after 3 years.
@@jhonson530i ur living in 2014?????
I love my Key2. It's as close as I got to my vintage Sidekick2 with functionality for IMs and excellent for PDF managing PC fix tickets. Saves me packing a laptop to access files. Had it replaced in warranty once and want to keep it in active use as long as I can.
apps killed the BB. once that became a thing, it was all over.
Also companies no longer supplying phones to their employees but instead relying BYOD. At first I didn't like the idea myself but now I'd never want to go back to having two phones to carry around.
The BlackBerry was so ubiquitous where I live that everyone still had one as a second phone even though they upgraded to an iphone or Android because everyone still used BBM
Washington DC?
Same here. Im from mumbai.
F
iMessage replaced it
We was still trappin on BBM
As a 12 year old kid I remember wanting a Blackberry every time I walked into a Fry’s or Best Buy
if you had one of them, you were the most hip in all of the land. A.K.A the school’s yard.
RIP Fry's
Goddamn I miss Fry's
For me it was a few years before that as iPhone fever was blasting off in 2012 with the iPhone 4S but I remember being 10 and oooing and awing over the one my Dad got from work.
what's fry's?
Thank you for your insightful commentary. I was surprised that you didn’t mention Jim Balsillie’s role in BlackBerry’s demise. Around 2011, he tried Getting an new NHL franchise into Hamilton Ontario. As a result he took his eye off the ball and blackberry started putting out low quality phones which as you mentioned had to be constantly replaced.
Interesting addition to the story. Canadians and their hockey LOL!
Ah yes. The "cool" kid phone in school.
Lol yess forreal these and sidekicks
I took a Wii/GameCube portable that I made myself before the pandemic
@Topan Lazuardi ?
I had a blackberry , I loved how a little light on it would blink twice when I had a text coming in , one of the few things I remember about it .
Yeah the iPhone light blinking just isn't the same since it's in the back.. Pfft
I'd forgotten about that. A very nice feature.
I actually really miss the light that blinked on my Blackberry Pearl.
Next video after BB stock pops off: "blackberry the rise fall...and rise again"
Diamond Hands Baby!!!
Diamond Hands Baby!!
DIAMOND HANDS
BB TO THE MOOOOOON!!!
BB is a distraction from AMC/GME.
I used to do Corporate IT support back in the early to mid 2000's and I've had serval over the years. A Blackberry was the device issued to the IT dept. staff and VP's. It was the first true functional business oriented smart device. They had a decent physical qwerty keyboard, a useful set of productivity apps the OS was inherently secure, it had virtually seamless corporate email integration with Domino or Exchange through BES. And of course later came BBM. The Pearl, Curve and Bold were the best models. They tried to follow the trend and go full touch screen with the Storm which was a flop. Then they tried to return to their roots with with the KeyOne (Android OS combined with an old school Blackberry) Which was decent but by then it was too late for them. I still have most of my old BBs in a drawer with the rest of my vintage cell phone collection. They did however excel at the infotainment interface in my Ford. with the Sync 3 which is way better than Microsoft's glitchy ass Myford touch Sync 2.
I loved keyboards on phones. Went to buy a Blackberry and was warned "There won't be many Apps for it , better get an iPhone"!
There's an app for that.
@@Mtlbro6 Not for a physical keyboard, there isn't. 😔
@@sketchur there's Bluetooth for that!
Get the Unihertz Titan
Everything is in the apps. Phone is just an app. "Smart phones" are just mini-computers running apps. Third-party apps is the only way to scale the platform and Apple definitely had the edge in this area. Once Android came around, Blackberry (and Nokia) had no hope. Only Microsoft could make a go of it, but there simply isn't room the market for three app platforms that developers have to support.
There is a great book, called "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry" that i would recommend to get a really great look how the company squandered the lead they had at the time.
That book is a must read to have a more complete understanding of what went wrong. "RIM didn't see the iPhone as a threat" is partially true, but an oversimplification. The cellular companies (the non-AT&T ones) were the ones that told RIM execs not to be concerned with the iPhone and to not put any development into a competing multimedia capable device.
I need to check that out. From an outside view (I’m Canadian and BB was a household name) it was all hubris. If you remember when the iPhone came out, Balsilie was more concerned with getting an NHL franchise. My belief, wrongly or rightly, was that RIM was too arrogant and never considered a full screen touch interface to be competitive.
@@wcg66 here's a short video of the author discussing the rise and fall of BlackBerry.
BlackBerry Jacquie McNish reveals inside story (Full Interview)
m.th-cam.com/video/LNZ8X1h2hIc/w-d-xo.html
This is a great video! iPhone definitely played a big part in their downfall, as well as the rise of Android.
The combination that, and that both carried apps.
Dont forget the emerging internet-supported apps
Also, I'm still annoyed that RIM failed to provide the Blackberry Priv with both the hardware features and software compatibility that it needed to be properly successful. It was an amazing premise because they managed to fit a portrait qwerty keyboard into a sliding mechanism that wasn't bulky. If I remember correctly, though, it didn't use the standard Google Play Store and it also had some problems with hardware quality control. It's such a shame, because that is precisely the configuration of device that I am most interested in.
Yep - There was a way to "side-load" some android apps, but not all and not by direct download. I did that with my Playbook until it got to the point where the apps that would actually work were just not worth having.
I dont like touchscreen keyboards, I keep my fingers on the keyboard when I type. The biggest reason for BB's decline wasn't the keyboard, it was the apps. The apple apps and then android apps just made their phones more usable than blackberry. By the time blackberry started allowing android apps it was too late.
And even then their implementation was really janky and used an old version of Android as the container they ran in.
@Tong Zou that's what I'm referring to. BB10 ran Android apps in a container that was based on an old version of Android. By most accounts, it didn't actually work all that well.
You know blackberry had released an android smartphone with a physical keyboard right? A few years ago, I don’t know why you would want it but if you really care about the keyboard do whatever you want
100% agree.
@Tong Zou are you just copying and pasting ur comment
Most of the people I knew who clung to their BlackBerries even after the brand declined claimed that it was still better for email. I think the reason they had trouble expanding beyond the business environment is because most people don't send a lot of emails outside of work anymore due to the rise of social media.
We use a lot of email in my company, iPhone is really good for it. The company does not want us on social media.
and apps. Blackberry couldn't compete with the itunes store or google play. Because RIMs hardware and software was so antiquated compared to iOS and Android that developers wouldn't build blackberry apps and RIM did nothing to that alleviate that situation. The RIM CEOs bragged about never touching an iPhone when the iPhone/Android craze started in 2009/2010. The original Droid and iPhone 3GS, and a year or so later the Samsung Galaxy, was the nail in the coffin. That arrogance is what ultimately lead to RIMS demise.
One small story I may add. On the day that Steve Jobs released the podcasts of the iPhone, a General Manager of RIM had to pull his car to the side road and listened to it entirely. When he got to his office later that day he called an urgent meeting with all of his direct managers and issued a statement that summed it up “We are done”.
I think another thing that may have been worth mentioning, even though it didn't turn things around for them, was the Z10 phone BlackBerry released in 2013. It was all touchscreen with a brand new operating system. I read the reviews which were really positive and was planning to buy one as soon as the contract on my old phone was up. But once that happened, it was clear that good or not, NO ONE was buying the new BlackBerries and I'd be buying into a dying ecosystem. Kind of like the Windows phone, it was just too late. It's too bad, because the Z10 looked like a cool phone.
@@ressljs it was, and the z30 was even better simply because of the size. The PRIV was the best of all worlds, full slideout keyboard that would allow you to scroll the full touchscreen simply by rubbing your fingers on the keys without pushing them. Android ecosystem with a full functioning app store. Battery that lasted for DAYS and my absolute favorite feature EVER, the BlackBerry HUB.
When I got a black berry in 2010 it was so cool and people couldn’t believe I had one but a couple years later it was outdated
I'm backing you up in the comments because I agree. In fact, I was carrying a Blackberry 10 years ago. I didn't get an iPhone 4s until late 2012 😅
I got my iPhone 4s mid year. I had been satisfied with simple Nokia phones till then. Never wanted a smart phone. Still don't.
@@rudyando You are not normal.
I never had one. I think my first cell phone was a Nokia. Now I have iPhone.
@@jaredballoonboy7944
😄
Probably not.
one of my friends was loyal till the end, he had whatever blackberry came out in 2018, it was actually kind of nice looking
The BlackBerry Keyone was released in 2017 and had all the same features as a iPhone 10 with the Iconic physical keyboard but Android based software. I have owned mine for 4 years and is a excellent device.
that was me too, i had the PRIV, the KeyOne and the Key2
I stopped at the passport
I remember back then the many ads in newspapers for hiring job include giving free blackberry phone. How nostalgic. 😅
I went to high school in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. Most folks thought of Waterloo, ON as just a college town, about an hour's drive south of Toronto and home of the prestigious University of Waterloo. The fact that RIM was headquartered there felt like a point of national pride. Here was a grassroots tech company that made it big and put Canada on the world tech market, standing toe to toe against giants like Samsung, Motorola and Apple. They were hometown heroes, and it felt for a time like Waterloo could become Canada's own version of Silicon Valley.
And yeah, I had a Blackberry of my own back in high school. It was *the* phone for popular kids to have, and all my friends had one. I begged my parents to get me a Blackberry, any Blackberry, and eventually they gave in and bought me a used Blackberry Curve. One of the coolest phones I ever had tbh. But the cracks started to show when Apple and Android phones started getting better and better with each generation, while Blackberry was still doing the same old thing as always with dwindling app support.
Haha ha truly a legendary phone. I used it at work back in the 2000s and all the cool kids had it.
*west (or NW) of Toronto.
I had that Blackberry Storm for my first smart phone back in 2009 and I absolutely loved it. The "gimmicky" click-able screen was the best thing ever. You almost never clicked on the wrong thing or made a mistake when typing things because it would only register what you clicked down on. I would give anything to have another phone like that. Such a great device
You were lucky. I did third tier support for Verizon back then and the Storm was a giant turd from the tech support standpoint. Tons of them had faulty screens and they wouldn’t “click” correctly.
@@thecrippledrummer that's crazy to hear. I think my storm would probably still work to this day if i charged it. I was a professional cowboy too do I was not easy on phones haha
You could stick a couple of screen protectors onto a cheap android and it'd probably have a similar effect
@@Matt_Bright_1983 top tier beard
I used to actually want one of these when I was in middle/high school. Now I'm cool with a Light Phone 2 and am stunned BlackBerry seemingly fell off the map so fast and far
I hated it when my company forced me to move to an iPhone from a Blackberry. I love the thing, and I believe it was more durable than the iPhone that I’ve replaced multiple times since that time.
You're not the only one. Most people I knew at that time hated the transition but were forced into it.
yeah, same here, especially how big tech is totally spying on us now like 1984 novel type of dystopia. I wish BB10 was still supported even with no apps just to have some privacy
@@TheFalseShepphard Or we could instead have governments create regulations to prevent companies from spying on you.
What is this bullshit that blames consumers when companies are being evil?
@Soy Orbison My phone was spammed after I donated to a charity on Twitter, so it's not the govt I'm tripping on.
@Soy Orbison I don't even use twitter anymore. The whole thing soured me.
I owned a BB for business purposes, and in a sense, I still do. Nowadays my BB is just an app on a regular cell phone, but I use it for business emails on the go. The main reason is that most regular email apps out there are not sufficiently secure. I have never heard of a BB email being hacked, and I certainly have never received robo calls or robo emails on my BB.
The old hardware was innovative for its time, but it could not compete with all the new apps on an iPhone.
The BlackBerry had such an iconic look - a look no other phone has ever managed to match. Nowadays, phones all look the same and offer the same too. Huge screens, no buttons, apps etc. The only difference is in the cameras, but I prefer using my Nikon and GoPro for pictures and video so it doesn't matter what my phone is packing. I own both a Samsung and an iPhone and they're all the same really. BlackBerry stood out and dared to be different, I actually miss their keyboards, but I also love the huge screens all the other phones have nowadays. Yes, they do all look the same, but they are very functional for watching youtube, reading manga and browsing apps.
The Android BlackBerry's such as the KEY2 can do most things that slabs can...they're just much better for typed communication and multitasking
I think the Motorolla Razr matches it based on iconic looks.
@@Electricityscape23 yes, so true, almost forgot about that! Definitely iconic too..
people thought the iphone was gonna fail since it had no buttons. it goes to show you the amount of sheep we have falling for marketing.
Not sure if anyone has pointed this out yet but the little circles on an actual blackberry actually have a name, they're called drupelets.
that should've been a Phineas & Ferb song
I thought they were chicklets?
I remember when physical keyboards started to go away from cellphones. That was also the time when BlackBerry became less and less relevant. Some of the phones they continue to license today surprisingly still have that signature physical keyboard!
I miss the slide-out keyboard on my Droid 1.
I grew up in the Waterloo area and man... I remember so many buildings were "RIM" Buildings around here back in the day! Pretty much everyone I knew had Blackberries and was on BBM. It used to be a status symbol having over 100 contacts on your BBM list! I do remember those annoying "PING!" messages my boss used to send me through BBM whenever I was ignoring him though...
But I fully agree with you, the Blackberry company failed to adapt and keep up with the emerging technologies. I remember one of their last bids for notoriety was supporting Flash content in their Blackberry Playbook (back in like 2011 or something), you know, back when Flash was still somewhat popular, but also on it's way out in favour of HTML5...
The iPhone moment happened.
And the rest is history.
And now almost every phone is a boring piece of glass
Not really, BlackBerry continued growing in popularity years after the iPhone was released. It's more complicated than just the iphone shifting everything.
@@BIadelores the graph literally shows when the iPhone came out, sales went down...
I cant wait for the eventual "rise and fall of youtube"
But where will you watch it?
@@robgronotte1 Exactly. Everyone wants TH-cam to go, but I keep repeating that the only way a model like TH-cam would work, where people also get paid for the content they produce, is to have ads and sponsors. Both of these involve other companies and other companies are going to have standards for what they do and don't want in videos with their names being promoted.
Not saying TH-cam is too big to fail as it happens to nearly all companies eventually. But paying people to put up content and cutting out the middlemen who actually have the money to do that on a global scale isn't a very simple process.
@@robgronotte1 Blip
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley I don't think anybody wants it to go I think we just want it to be changed for the better at least that's what I want
You will be waiting a very long time it’s the second largest website
blackberry had the chance to release a wholesale worthy competitor, they also had the funding to do so, since they were a lot more established in the phone market, but they didnt. RIP early 2000's you wont be forgotten
Well put and Like titanic they thought they were to big and dominant to do anything against the competition so they came they were hit and rest is history 🤷🏾♂️
I Live in the Waterloo region where research in motion was founded and I remember everybody having a BlackBerry in high school because they were so easy to get in our area
They are the true original smartphone.
I remember my grandma getting a new blackberry every year because her phone wouldn't last past a year without breaking but it was what she was used to. She used it more as a personal business phone for calling and catching with relatives and friends. Around 2016 she finally changed to a smartphone and she hasn't been happier, plus it doesn't have buttons that easily break lol.
I can literally still power up every single BlackBerry device I owned throughout the years. They could take a beating too.
was your grandma a lady hulk?
My grandma lived to 100 and we couldn't even get her to try a jitterbug.
Man this makes me remember when my parents had blackberries. Those were simpler times
When I was in middle school I had a BlackBerry torch. It was 2009. I loved that phone. I used it so much that the paint around the call buttons were chipped away. I absolutely loved the keyboard.
I got a BlackBerry the summer before my junior year of high school in 2010. I kept it for a year and, interestingly, switched to the iPhone the following summer as the front-facing camera and other features became a must-have. It was interesting to watch this and see that peak in 2011 because it did feel like everyone had one, and then the following school year, it was all about the iPhone, and we were like, BlackBerry, who? I didn't realize the iPhone was AT&T exclusive at first, which makes sense why I didn't have one right away since my family was a Verizon customer.
Blackberry had an amazing design. I keep imagining a cellphone with the appearance of a Blackberry running linux as an operating system, it would be a killer!!
The BB10 OS we created from Linux based system acquired through QNX purchase,was awesome and introduced in Q10 and Z10 devices. It was a very robust OS and unprecedented in how quickly it was fully realized and launched. Unfortunately BB had missed the boat, had no $ to market the launch, and fizzled utterly soon after. Nearly 10K of us lost our fantastic jobs in Waterloo alone. What an utter disaster from management...
@@kerrybock766 Man, this story deserves a documentary! 😮😮👍👍will I find the Q10 around yet?
Pinephone with the keyboard case.
Not a sad story like Nokia. For almost two decades they were the no.1 mobile phone company in the world, then it vanished within a few years 😔 Crazy
nokia was even worse because they actually pivoted and made some really good smartphones with THE best cameras in the market (lumia series) but microsoft screwed them royally. it was a windows phone with no android option, no play store integration so almost no apps at all. imagine having a phone with the best cameras and no ability to use instagram.
@@apeoplesperson you are talking about Huawei ??
@@apeoplesperson Instagram svcks
Atleast nokia is back with androids n its very premium
@SomedayIWT Correct. Back in 2007 I had Nokia N95 with a 5 MP camera, while the new iphone had a 2 MP camera.
It was hugely popular at one time and earned the nickname of "CrackBerry"
I always assumed it sas becasue people with cracked screens
I owned a black barry back in 2011 when they were still booming. When I saw the title of the video the nostalgia came flooding back to me about when I owned a blackberry and I have to tell you I prefer the design of the blackberry over any of the other smartphones. Now this is just my own bias point of view when I say I’m tired of the modern smartphones today with Apple and Samsung being the flagships. I just feel as if there is no verity now a days compared to back then. Nowadays you’re really only left with 2 options and it sucks because I remember a time when the smartphone market was more diverse.
My buddy Barry is black too. I don't _own_ him though.
@@bigtombowski
😂
Nah, those plastic keyboard was a deal breaker, especially nowadays when people prefer bigger phone screens. There is a reason phones with physical keyboards became obsolete.
That og blackberry with the text pad was the ultimate phone. Good pricing and solid functions. Once they got rid of the keyboard, I never bothered. One of the main complaints I heard was the apps on the new blackberry was limited. They had a app store with very little to offer.
I was surprised when you didn’t mention security. I work in the public sector and after 9/11, security and encryption became paramount and slowed delivery in the rapid development of web applications. As the cell phones were being issued and devices chosen, Blackberry claimed to have full encryption which is processor intensive but appealing at the time. Others were skeptical of the phone’s security capabilities but I never found out who was right. I carried a BlackBerry for several years and was upset to be issued an iPhone.
It doesn't matter now, but there was a period of time when the device unique identifier could be cloned. The device identifier was what enabled the RIM relay to know who to serve to or accept data from, so this was a huge security vulnerability. To RIM's credit, they introduced a further variable used in the key exchange within a few months of me bringing the issue to their attention. Considering the scope of the change and the speed, I'd guess it was all hands on deck to get it delivered that quickly. This is circa 2008, but anyone in the industry could see the writing on the wall by that point, I had a couple of HTC's on User Acceptance Testing and it was apparent that both Win Smartphone and Blackberry OS would be lost one way or another, falling to iOS or Android. We knew that Nokia was doomed when it made it's bed with Win Smartphone after Symbian Series 60 for a similar reason, Symbian had many issues (first widespread phone virus amongst other things), but WinCE through Smartphone was just a dog's dinner in code and UI (though I did think the Communicator was pretty sweet
Also important for security was lack of camera versions.
As a Candian, Blackberry made us the cool kid on the block for a brief period in time.
A Candian? Are you from the Candy Kingdom or something?
I had a couple blackberrys from around 2008 to 2011 and they were amazing phones especially the keyboard. I was around 21 or so and it wasn't for business at all and a few of my friends had them too. I ended up changing it for a samsung galaxy s2 it was just better overall with web browsing playing music etc. But I always did miss the physical keyboard. If only blackberry switched to android early on then I think more people would have kept a blackberry or at least tried it out.
Damn, I remember BalckBerry phones were huge from like 2009-2012 then I swear 2013 came along and I didn't see a single blackberry since lmao
IPhone popularity killed them real quick lol
I thought it was the end for black berry when I saw the iphone. I couldn't figure out why anyone would still want a black berry when you had a device like an iphone that was so flexible. I think the iPhones biggest selling point was its compatibility with computers as well as apps.
iphone 3gs
2010 with the IPhone 4, HTC Androids and Samsung Galaxy phones was the beginning of the end.
wrong gangsta macc. Not being offered by U.S. carriers any longer and a price point around 6x as much as you could get an iphone through the same carrier is what killed them.
"The Blackberry can send mail" isn't the killer feature they thought it was
7:52 I don't think that debate was ever finalized, honestly. I typed faster on a physical keyboard, I miss phones that had keyboards that slide out from under the phone horizontally. Sure, it made the phones a bit thicker, but you get a lot more feedback from a physical keyboard than a touch screen. Funny how a "fad" can become the only choice lol.
Well, there is a good reason why physical computer keyboards aren't dead and physical phone keyboards are. The small, cramped, and unchangable physical keyboard of a phone makes it impractical for alot of people who types in other keyboard formats and having all of your characters, signs, and dashes on one single key that needs double-tapping. Which is why physical keyboards on a phone isn't ideal for many.
I read 90% of the time on my phone. Typing text messages is not that common
QWERTY keyboard on a slider phone was awesome. I also type much faster with the physical keyboard. I could even type without looking at the keyboard.
As an old BB 9000, Q10, and Keyone user, I think the features of the new 5G Blackberry must be the following: Key2-type keyboard, robust frame, long-life quick charging battery, Blackberry Secure Operating System (with compatibility to Google Play apps), clever and ergonomic facilities, Contacts app with more manipulation functions and MS Outlook compatibility (like that of BB Bold 9000). The camera must have a stabilizer, support slow motion, but no need for tons of MB picture resolutions (4K is enough). No need for fancy curved displays. Must have an easy memory insertion slot, stereo speakers (like those fantastic mini ones of BB 9000) as well as programmable notification profiles (like those of BB 9000). The back skin must be soft and leather-like. Finally, the price must not exceed the cheapest iPhone one!!!! This will boost the BB sales, hoping for a victorious come-back.
I guess the obvious companion piece for this is the Rise and Fall of the Palm Pilot
Yeah he should do the history of Palm because oh boy is it a doozy
Oh hey, I have a Palm phone. It's great! Every barista knows me by my phone now haha
They just didn't bother to sell blackberry strongest point, the encryption from the phone to the tower and back. It was almost as if they made a deal with the devil in that regard.
I'm 36 and I'm still rocking a BlackBerry, waiting patiently for the new phone.
Yeah, he also ignored that probably the best smartphone you can get with a keyboard is an Android Blackberry that came out in 2018.
Can you even use google?
@@WyWid Barely. The phone is decent but support for it died after TCL lost the license.
@@AlexKiritz Maybe the Unihertz Titan Pocket will be the next best keyboard option you can get...
Where are you from? Why don’t you buy even xiaomi for $200?
Company man: The Rise and Fall
The iPhone most definitely killed the Blackberry but going with that business side of things alot of rappers myself included we had blackberries cuz we can write out verses on them with the keypad so they were very big in the hip-hop community
It was a combination of Apple, the new Androids, and the Windows based smartphones. I was a Verizon tech at that time and we even had people still using Palm phones. I used Blackberries until the “Google phone” was released. I used it for a few months then tried an iPhone. Haven’t switched since and that was 2009.
I want a rereleased update of the blackberry curve & pearl. I miss phones like this, everything is a boring glass slab now.
I had a blackberry pearl. My kids thought it was so cool back in the day. Lol!
I had a Curve and as you said, if it could be re-released with “modern” updates I’d grab one tomorrow
Agree!
@@peterplanz2310 same here, I still prefer an actual keyboard
try out Blackberry Classic
in 2005
Blackberry: introduces a product nobody knew they needed.
Everybody: take my money!!
pretend i replied something funny
@@okamecherryblossom
not funny
Didn't laugh
@@cavalierliberty6838 well aren't you special.
@@paulheap1982 my mommy always told me i was when she put on my helmet and kneepads before school. Speaking of which, you know the windows taste like bacon, right?
@@cavalierliberty6838 so you do have wit. Well half at least.
I owned a Blackberry Bold in 2009 before switching to iPhone. I bought my Blackberry mid way through my MBA program. A lot of us had one until the realization that we could have an iPhone that not only provided our business needs but also personal and entertainment needs. It made for better synchronization with our Macs as well.
I remembered blackberry when it was at their prime. during 2007-2010, my family used them: My dad, my mom, and my sister would always have their attention glued to the screens. By 2012, they replaced them for iphones as keyboards tend to fail after constant use. Once the iphone 4 was in the market, it was doom for blackberry as they no longer could compete with it...
People at my company always called it the "crackberry" because people who had it were always on it
Always on what? The drug or the phone?
@@braders5192 ... the phone
On a similar note - but not an identical note by any means - I remember being in high school (2008-2009ish) playing so much World of Warcraft my grades began to suffer a little. Everyone told me that was fairly common, which was why some people called it "World of War-Crack" because it was just so addictive. It really is incredible how much technology can overtake your life, whether it be smart phone dependency or video game addiction.
@@braders5192 😂😂😂
Workaholics still check their email 24/7 on their iPhones.
I always wanted a Blackberry back in the day. I thought they were so cool and uniquely designed. That changed when the iPhone came out and wanting a Blackberry was all but a distant memory.
From 2010-2014/2015ish, I had a BlackBerry work phone and a personal phone. It was around 2014 or 2015 that the company I worked for moved to a BYOD model and had people start using their personal phones for company stuff, and we turned in our BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) at that time.
I remember my mother’s blackberry. Any time she took me and my brothers places and needed us to just stay put for a minute she would let us play brick break on her phone.
Brick Breaker was the Blackberry evergreen like Nokia's "Snake". ^_^ Crazy fun if you had nothing else to play with.
I agree, BlackBerry was one of those must have devices before smartphones were more economical. My parents and grandparents had them when I was growing up.
I never wanted a blackberry but I did get a two way though!!!!!!!
What are the odds a five second clip with Jimmy Fallon has him laughing.
I had Blackberry devices from the 957 (this video doesn't mention that the 850 and 857 were replaced by the 950 and 957 models, which operated on the 900Mhz network vs the 800Mhz) up through the Storm from years 2001-ish through 2010. These were for business, but the key that the video left out was the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), which tied into an organization's MS-Exchange or Lotus Notes email system. That's why they were mainly used for business - the original models required connectivity to a BES and a corporate email system. Later, as the devices became more mainstream, they were able to do POP3 or IMAP with any email account, but without all of the security that came with an encrypted connection to a BES.