BlackBerry Pearl
The BlackBerry that didn't look like a BlackBerry. RIM shrank the slab to a candybar, swapped the scroll wheel for a glowing trackball, and added a camera — and suddenly people who had never been issued one by an IT department wanted one.
Research In Motion launched the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 on September 12, 2006, and it broke most of the brand's rules. It was the first BlackBerry with a camera and a media player, which mattered because BlackBerrys had been corporate email machines; the Pearl was built to sell to ordinary consumers while still running the full enterprise stack. Its ad campaign featured Mariska Hargitay and Douglas Coupland.
The shape was the point. Instead of the wide body with a full QWERTY keyboard, the Pearl was a narrow candybar with a hybrid keypad — two letters per key, five columns across — and a predictive system called SureType that guessed the word. In place of the side scroll wheel sat the pearl itself, a translucent trackball that rolled in every direction, lit from beneath by LEDs whose color software could change. The notification light in the corner could be made to blink in different colors too.
Updated versions followed: the 8120 with Wi-Fi and a 2-megapixel camera and the CDMA 8130 with GPS in October 2007, then the 8110 with GPS but no Wi-Fi in May 2008, across carriers from T-Mobile and Cingular/AT&T to Sprint and Verizon. In September 2008 RIM announced the Pearl Flip 8220 — its first flip phone, codenamed "KickStart" — and the Pearl 3G of April 2010 replaced the trackball with a trackpad. The Pearl broadened BlackBerry from an office tool into something a teenager might ask for, in the narrow window between its 2006 debut and the iPhone the following summer.
Similar items
BlackBerry
The thumb-typed email machine that owned the boardroom, then the teen universe — the hottest phone in America right up until the iPhone ate it. Push email, the blinking red light, BBM: BlackBerry was so addictive that Webster's New World made "CrackBerry" its 2006 Word of the Year.
Palm Treo
The smartphone before the smartphone: a full thumb keyboard, a stylus, Palm OS, and the then-startling ability to check your calendar in the middle of a call. Built by the PalmPilot's own inventors after they walked out on Palm.
Motorola Razr
The Razr V3 launched in late 2004 as the world's thinnest clamshell phone at a shocking $500. Its anodized-aluminum body, laser-etched keypad, and impossible thinness made it a fashion statement. When the price dropped in 2005–2006, everyone had one—and snapping it shut after a call was the whole point.
T-Mobile Sidekick
The swivel QWERTY phone that made AIM mobile before smartphones existed. The Sidekick was the texting status symbol — if you had one, you were cool.