What Happened to BlackBerry?
No longer making phones, the beleaguered brand soldiers on
When the first BlackBerry smartphone was introduced in 1999, it was destined to become a global sensation. In fact, BlackBerry became one of the world’s best known smartphone brands. By late 2013, BlackBerry boasted 85 million subscribers.
But in 2017, that number plummeted to around 11 million and, in January 2022, BlackBerry phones were “decommissioned” — the Canadian company’s polite way of saying the phones are officially useless. Yet despite the brand’s apparent demise, BlackBerry lives on. The company’s journey is one of the more unusual in tech history… and here is its story.
An auspicious beginning
Founded in 1984 as Research In Motion (RIM) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, the company first created a two-way pager in 1996 which evolved into the BlackBerry 850, introduced in 1999. You might think the unusual name was an attempt to one-up Apple, but it was supposedly derived from the unique keyboard buttons that resembled the tiny globes of the blackberry fruit.
