Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How iPhone KILLED the BlackBerry”.
What was the height of cool before the iPhone hit the scene in 2007? Maybe for you it was busting out your Motorola RAZR at Warped Tour, but for a lot of others it was actually the blackberry, but beyond the botanical name and an addictiveness that led observers to call it the CrackBerry. The blackberry was actually a very different kind of smartphone from what we’re used to today was actually initially marketed to businesspeople as an alternative to lugging around the slow heavy laptops of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, blackberry employees even gave the devices away for free trials to people that they saw using laptops, encouraging them to give the BlackBerry a try, because it was an always connected device that would instantly notify the user if they got a new email. Now because email was quickly becoming a preferred method of communication for businesses, a device with push email notifications, as well as an ergonomic full QWERTY keyboard that made typing significantly easier than on other handheld devices caught on pretty quickly. Remember guys. This was before touchscreen technology became widespread and all those cellular data speeds at the time were very slow.
Sending and receiving a few lines of text in an email didn’t require much bandwidth. So suddenly there was this device that was much more convenient than either a laptop or a Palm Pilot which, for the earlier models, had to be synchronised manually with your PC, so blackberries quickly found their way into the hands of executives and politicians everywhere, not just for Email, but also to keep their personal information safe thanks to the additional encryption of blackberry messenger compared to traditional, SMS, instant messaging. This at the stage for the company to keep expanding and eventually release a very successful line of devices that we would recognize today. As true smartphones, albeit still with the full physical keyboard, that became one of BlackBerry’s signature features and then the iPhone hit the scene and it didn’t take long for the BlackBerry to fade away into obscurity. But why was this just a result of hype from Apple’s flashy advertisements with white earphones? Well, it turns out that, while that may have been a factor, blackberry also missed some key indicators about where the industry was headed.
When the iPhone was announced, blackberry was still growing by leaps and bounds and they didn’t see the point in trying to compete with a device that they viewed as something for younger, less serious consumers and to boot. The BlackBerry execs assumed that cell networks simply wouldn’t be able to keep up with how much data the iPhone was designed to send and receive. Instead, blackberry decided to keep selling primarily to business users that wanted a secure platform and honestly, it kind of seemed to make sense at the time, as this was exactly the formula that vaulted blackberry to their position as a major player on the phone scene. However, business users were much more easily wowed by the iPhone and later Android phones as well, then blackberry anticipated. Not only did the touchscreen centric design of competing phones have more futuristic. Sex appeal, iOS and Android were more open platforms in that Apple and Google, designed them specifically with third-party developers in mind that could release thousands of apps to expand their devices. Functionality, blackberry, on the other hand, continued to rely on first party apps, at least in part, because it still thought of its phones as just that phones, rather than the do at all devices that now dominate the market. The death-knell, though, didn’t come until companies started figuring out that the more consumer focused iPhones and Android phones that their employees already owned were just as capable as a blackberry, if not more so so. At that point turns out businesses just love, saving money who knew right. They generally started having their employees, bring those to work and use them for that too. Instead of investing in a fleet of BlackBerry’s – and I mean there were other missteps to remember how controversial Apple’s decision to dump Adobe Flash was well, although it was inconvenient at the time, Apple was ultimately correct that the mobile industry would move away from it.
But you can learn more about here by the way. Blackberry, on the other hand, continued to make supporting flash a priority, even though the hardware inside their phones wasn’t powerful enough to run it anyway. They also stubbornly ignored that consumer sentiment was rapidly shifting toward favoring touchscreens. Over physical buttons, including on the business side, so all of this meant that Blackberry went from controlling over 40 % of the American smartphone market in late 2009 to zero in 2016. That’S right! My friends, blackberry! The company has stopped making their own phones altogether. Now the BlackBerry name is still around and the flavor of Android that current Blackberry phones run is still being worked on by blackberry, but long gone is BlackBerry’s, custom-built mobile operating system and the phones you see on the market are actually made by other companies under licensing Agreements for the name don’t feel too sad for blackberry, though I tried one once and it was honestly wonderful. It was both tart and sweet. At the same time, I hear it’s absolutely fantastic in PI’s, just not as good as Apple speaking of not as good. If you want to make a website, that’s not as good then don’t use.
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You know it’s still cool. We want black BlackBerry viewers to all six of you. .