The history of BlackBerry devices begins in 1984 with the founding of Research In Motion in Canada.

Since its foundation, the company has specialized in the production of devices for wireless data transmission. The devices allowed typing and sending any text to other similar devices. Outwardly, they resembled pagers.

In 1997, RIM decided to market these devices under a new brand, which was commissioned to Lexicon Branding Inc., known for developing the Pentium and Zune brands.

Since the use of corporate text communication at that time was a rather complicated process, the company's specialists decided that the name of the device should come from the opposite, bringing associations with summer holidays, fruits and berries.

The “blackberry” option simultaneously resembled the appearance of the device (black with a set of small rounded QWERTY keyboard buttons reminiscent of a multidrupe fruit) and seemed to the copywriters to successfully combine the chosen “berry” theme (berry) while maintaining a connection with corporate production (black).

The name turned out to be very successful - many BlackBerry users do not even suspect that this is a trademark of the product, and not the name of the manufacturing company.

In May 2013, BlackBerry 10-based smartphones were approved by the US Department of Defense for corporate use by Department of Defense employees.

At the end of September 2016, Blackberry announced that it no longer plans to produce smartphones. The company will reportedly focus on software development, while its Chinese partners will manufacture smartphones.

On December 14, 2017, the BlackBerry Travel website was announced to be closed in February 2018, the Playbook video calling service in March 2018, and the BlackBerry World app store on December 31, 2019.
2020: TCL Communication has decided to stop the production and sale of BlackBerry smartphones, sales will end on August 31, 2020; the company undertakes to provide support and warranty service for all devices sold so far until August 31, 2022.

In this video we show you the evolution of BlackBerry phones from 1996 to 2018.

00:00 Intro
01:20 1996
01:30 1998
01:40 2000
01:50 2002
02:08 2003
02:22 2004
03:04 2005
03:31 2006
04:11 2007
04:47 2008
05:26 2009
06:00 2010
06:39 2011
07:39 2012
08:04 2013
08:42 2014
09:18 2015
09:47 2016
10:07 2017
10:34 2018
11:05 End