Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Phones Were Fun – BlackBerry’s Flip (Before The Flop)”.
This video is sponsored by surfshark phone addiction screen timing, digital detox in 2023, we’re well acquainted with the narcotic effect smartphones have on our brains. But what? If I told you that the first seeds of our mobile digital dependents, weren’t planted by Google or Apple but by a Canadian company, called Research In Motion that made a little device called the Blackberry like many white collar guys before me, a Blackberry was my first smartphone, Which I bought, because I was worried that I would soon get laid off from my job and while I still had some income, I wanted to buy the most capable mobile device. I could, in 2005 on my carrier Nextel, that was the Blackberry 7520, a hulking monster of a PDA that brought internet to a messaging third-party apps and email to my hip holster two years before anyone had heard of anything called iPhone by the time I bought mine, Blackberries had already become notorious as the smartphones people couldn’t put down their instant email capability, so addictive that they became known as crack. Berries, stay tuned to the ad for a special fun fact about that, whereas they were in the mid-auts. Blackberries were also unmistakably corporate.
They were company phones carried by company men and women, tied to expensive Enterprise rate plans with few toys and no cameras which, at the time were still seen as dangerous liabilities by corporate security departments. Wary of industrial espionage, so Rim embraced the latter half of its brand name and sprung into motion on a different line of blackberries for consumers, a silver body, a speakerphone that looks like the Transformers face, a concerning amount of skeuomorphism and Comic Sans. If it didn’t say Blackberry right on the bezel, I wouldn’t have believed it, but the 7100 brought the company’s famous rapid fire email capabilities to a more slender casing, meant to appeal to a more conventional consumer by introducing a new keyboard called sure type. It was laid out like a full QWERTY, so your muscle memory stayed intact, but it placed two letters onto each key to save space and used clever autocomplete software to help decide what words you were trying to Clack out. It worked surprisingly well Rim used. Similarly, smart software to make its click wheel work most of the time you could get to what you needed on your blackberry with a minimum of clicks, because the menus were laid out so well. The click wheel was also the best way to play. The one game Rim did ship on blackberries the arcanoid Clone brick breaker. Nevertheless, the click wheel took up a lot of space in the casing and by 2005 it was pretty clear that Blackberry needed an updated interface mechanism, one that wasn’t inspired by a 1990s BCR remote control. That mechanism was the trackball and it made its debut on a phone that would serve as the on-ramp for millions of freshly minted crackberry addicts, the BlackBerry Pearl. It wasn’t just about the trackball. The Pearl was blackberry’s first, camera phone, the first to ship with removable storage and an MP3 player to make the most of it foreign. It was also tiny, shrinking the 7100s shore type keyboard into a footprint. That’S absolutely comical when you put it up against a modern smartphone funny enough. Even this wasn’t small enough for some folks in some European markets where people were buying Blackberry, mainly for messaging instead of email Rim offered a version of the Pearl called the 9105, with a numeric keypad, the closest thing to a conventional phone. The company would ever ship between the Pearl the curve and the Bold families Rim succeeded in blanketing every buyer segment with enough options that Blackberry really did become the it smartphone of the day before there was Apple iMessage. There was BBM with its end-to-end encryption and red receipts. Blackberry was everywhere in the culture from soldier boy, songs to Kardashian, tweets to the White House to apparently the Nigerian film industry, where a four-hour movie called Blackberry. Babes was a thing. It was into this era of wall-to-wall blackberry saturation.
That Rim decided to inject some hinges, see while slide phones were popular elsewhere. The majority of phones, you were likely to see in the U.S during this first decade of this century, were flip phones and as a card-carrying member of the flip phone fan club, let me tell you the only way I could stand settling for that slab of a 7520 was by carrying a clam shell alongside, hence the nickname that endures to this day, so Rim decided to release a pair of blackberries just for we Western weirdos, the Pearl flip of 2008 and the BlackBerry style of 2010.. Now, despite its enormous mainstream success. At this point, in its history, research in motion’s best days were behind it.
The company had entered a phase. One employee called the goat Rodeo As Told in the excellent book losing the signal which I will link in the description anyway, but 2010. The iPhone was well into the process of redefining the smartphone, Microsoft and palm were launching phones with software ideas, so good that companies are still stealing from them today, and the eventual dominance of Google’s Android platform was already becoming clear. Against that competition.
Rem was scrambling to compete on the new front in the mobile War, the app ecosystem. It was trying to preserve the security and corporate benefits, its Enterprise clients loved, while also modernizing its image for consumers, and it was doing all this while building an entirely new platform meant to carry Blackberry phones and tablets into the mid-ought. The BlackBerry style is a direct reflection of the conflict into which it was born at my eBay, sourced model didn’t come with the original packaging, but thankfully we have Legacy unboxings from crackberry Kevin and Miriam Noir to remind us that oh yeah phone packaging used to be Terrible, especially when the phone in question only worked on CDMA, which meant the packaging was left to a carrier like Sprint in the U.S yeah. I worked there.
I remember this generic cardboard plastic everywhere, but hey in exchange. We got earbuds and memory cards and removable batteries whose capacity of 1150 milliamp hours is just so cute, and today’s 5 000 milliamp hour world price 99 with a two-year contract. After a hundred dollar mail-in rebate, the style itself was also well equipped for the time, at least for a Blackberry.
By making it wider Rim was able to fit in a full qwerty keyboard, similar to the one customers loved on its bold family even today years. Since I last carried a Blackberry, I know that when I’m typing an email address, I don’t need to use the shift key to insert the at or dot symbols. I just hit the space bar and the phone is smart enough to put them in. For me, those little idiosyncrasies are strewn throughout the software and they’re the things that kept people like me. Coming back to the devices, despite the Aging slow Java based software and the outages on the server side, that became concerningly frequent over time.
The style used similar smarts to make its cover screen useful, even when the phone was closed by letting you scroll through messages with the side, keys, nope no touch screen, but you didn’t really need it. Also by this time, the trackball had been replaced by a solid-state track pad that was more resistant to dust and which made for a fun scene in the new BlackBerry movie. Speaking of that movie, I had the Good Fortune of being invited to an early screening by Qualcomm and IFC, where I put the Blackberry Styles, 5 megapixel camera to good use, blinding fellow attendees, with its searing LED flash. Ah, there’s just something so inevitably 2010 about these photos and the fact that they were shot just a couple weeks ago.
Instead of you know, 13 years ago, further amplifies the sense that phones well, they really can be time machines of a sort. Here’S another thing about the style: it reminds me that the world of tech, even the smaller subset of mobile tech, is still full of surprises. If I had shot this video five years ago, I would have ended it lamenting the loss not just of blackberry, but the flip phone form factor, but thanks to flexible screens, flip phones are making a comeback.
I mean you’ve got to wonder how much this royal purple paint job influenced Samsung in its color scheme, selection for the Galaxy flip family of foldables, between that color and the aspect ratio and the overall form factor the style. Weirdly feels more modern today than it would have back when the last flagship phone bearing the Blackberry brand crossed my review desk by the time that happened with the key 2 in 2018 Rim had renamed itself after its most popular product and changed operating systems Twice. First, to its kinex-based Blackberry, 10, then to Android, and it finally ended up licensing its brand to TCL for the last few devices to carry the name, but never again would it make another flip phone because never again would it be subjected to the unique cocktail of Pressures and opportunities that presented themselves in 2010. if this time period in mobile tech is interesting to you there’s a very similar story I covered in an earlier when phones were fun episode featuring the Palm Centro and there’s also so much more to learn about blackberry’s story. I wanted to include the infamous Blackberry Storm in this article, but the the unit I got from eBay is so deep into the process of melting into a puddle of latex that I couldn’t even pick it up.
Oh it somehow gotten worse with age. Oh, oh! I can’t even rubber reversion strikes again, but I’ll do another Blackberry episode at some point, whether on the Playbook or on the torch or just on another phase of the company’s history. In the meantime, the Blackberry movie will see wide release on May 12th. Man, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys when phones were fun, I think you’ll love it also one more shout out to the book upon which it’s based losing the signal.
It really is great, oh and finally, there is one other thing that was notable from this period. At least to me, the fervent fan base that materialized around the Blackberry would eventually spawn crackberry.com headed up by the aforementioned crackberry Kevin, whose emails to a young Tech blogger in 2015 would eventually lead to the creation of Mr mobile. What a tangled QWERTY clock and web. We weave, if you’re tired of hearing about surf shark, I get it after all the company’s been my sponsor for four years, but if you think about it, that’s a good thing. It means surfshark has done its job of keeping me and its customers safe. While browsing the web all over the world, you also might have noticed that I haven’t taken a sponsorship from any other VPN company since I started and that’s not because I can’t it’s because I haven’t felt the need to use anyone but surf shark.
In addition to securing my connection on Wi-Fi networks all around the world, it also guarantees I can still access media and services that might otherwise be restricted by the country I’m browsing from. If that sounds useful to you, get surf shark at the link in the description and use code, Mr mobile for 83 off and three extra months, free thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video. This video was made possible by a bevy of blackberries purchased from eBay loaned from fellow Tech folks orb left over from the days when I still did BlackBerry reviews, but neither Blackberry nor IFC, nor any other company had any editorial input into this content. The loan sponsor is surf shark until next time from Michael Fisher, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .