The BlackBerry was once the icon for successful working people. Nickname: crackberry, because of the ‘addictive’ properties of the device with its handy keyboard.
But after the introduction of the iPhone, and other touchscreen phones, usage slowly died out. And since Tuesday, the BlackBerry has officially ‘deceased’: on January 4, the servers on which the devices run went off the air, so you can’t really do anything with it. Only a group of newer BlackBerrys, made under license by the Chinese electronics company TCL and with an Android operating system, are not affected by this.
‘Extension of e-mail mailbox’
In the 1990s, the BlackBerry, made by the company then called Research in Motion, was launched in the United States and Canada. With the black device, users could suddenly read their mail everywhere and type a super-fast answer on a Qwerty keyboard – calling was only possible a few years later, from 2002.
The device “works as an extension of the e-mail mailbox on the PC”, explained NRC to readers in 2001, when the device was also introduced in Europe. “Emails that arrive – when the PC user is on the road – are immediately forwarded to the mobile device.”
The BlackBerry has been embraced by bankers, lawyers and politicians like Barack Obama. Jan Peter Balkende was also an adept. When the then prime minister ended up in hospital in 2004 because of an aggressive bacteria in his foot and therefore had to cancel on Budget Day, he could continue to send e-mails from his bed “via his BlackBerry pocket computer”, reported NRC at the time.
But however convenient, the use of BlackBerrys did come with a price, Joris Luyendijk noted in 2012, when he wrote at length about the City of London. There, he wrote, there are already “bizarre working hours”. But ever since the BlackBerry arrived, employees have never rested, they are “permanently available; evenings, weekends, holidays…”
the downfall
In 2007 Steve Jobs presented the device that in retrospect (partly) ushered in BlackBerry’s downfall: the iPhone. But as is often the case, the danger was not immediately recognized. It would be an “exaggeration” to call Apple’s device a “turnaround,” he said RiM CEO Jim Balsillie shortly after the introduction of the first iPhone. BlackBerry continued to rely on the safe and solid image, and the convenience of a real keyboard (a successful model with a touchscreen would never come).
For years, the Canadian company also went very well. Between 2008 and (peak) 2011, turnover tripled to almost $20 billion (17.6 billion euros). That year, $3.4 billion in profit was made.
At the time, BlackBerry was undergoing a metamorphosis. While maker Research in Motion was still aiming at the type of investment banker, the smartphone suddenly became very popular among young people. Mainly because of the ‘ping’: sending free messages to other BlackBerry users. “When I saw him I immediately gave all my numbers; my e-mail, my ping”, said fashion model Doutzen Kroes in 2010 in Show news, about the moment she met her future husband.
Also read this piece from 2016: What did we do for WhatsApp? ping
But pinging was gradually supplanted by WhatsApp and the BlackBerry went out of style. Except, as it turned out, with criminals who send each other encrypted messages with BlackBerry’s encryption software – in 2017, the detectives first announced that they had cracked a server with these kinds of messages.
After sales deteriorated for years and in 2013 it suffered a loss for the first time (545 million dollars), Research in Motion, which had since been renamed BlackBerry, changed course. The company would now focus on software. In 2015, it made its last own BlackBerry.
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