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.
Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin founded Research In Motion in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1984, but the product that made the company arrived fifteen years later: the BlackBerry 850, an email pager released in January 1999 that did one thing better than anything else — push email, delivered instantly, no waiting.
The 850 was an email device, not a phone. That changed in 2002 with the BlackBerry 5810, the first model that could make calls — but the signature stayed the same: a physical QWERTY keyboard beneath a small screen, built for thumb-typing. The keyboard became ritual. Executives could answer email in the cab, on the plane, at dinner — and the blinking red notification light made sure they always did.
On August 1, 2005, RIM launched BlackBerry Messenger, and BBM turned a work tool into a social network: messages between BlackBerrys arrived instantly, and suddenly teenagers wanted the executive's phone. The addiction had a name — "CrackBerry" — and Webster's New World crowned it the 2006 Word of the Year. Barack Obama was famously dependent on his through the 2008 campaign. In 2009, BlackBerry held 56 percent of the American smartphone market; US users peaked at almost 22 million in September 2010, while the global subscriber base kept growing into 2012, to nearly 80 million.
By then the ending had already started. The iPhone arrived in 2007 with no keyboard at all, Android followed, and BlackBerry's great advantage — dedicated hardware for typing — became the thing holding it back. The company renamed itself from Research In Motion to BlackBerry Limited on January 30, 2013, stopped designing its own phones on September 28, 2016 (licensing the brand to TCL that December), and on January 4, 2022 switched off the legacy services that kept the classic devices alive. The phones went quiet; the red light stopped blinking.
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