BlackBerry

BlackBerry is a discontinued brand of handheld devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry device launched in 1999 in North America, running on the Mobitex network (later also DataTAC) and became very popular because of its "always on" state and ability to send and receive email messages wirelessly. The BlackBerry pioneered push notifications and popularized the practise of "thumb typing" using its QWERTY keyboard, something that would become a trademark feature of the line.

In its early years, the BlackBerry proved to be a major advantage over the (typically) one-way communication pagers and it also removed the need for users to tether to personal computers. It became especially used in the corporate world in the US and Canada. RIM debuted the BlackBerry in Europe in September 2001, but it had less appeal there where text messaging using SMS was more established. With the advancement of cellular technology, RIM released in 2002 the first BlackBerry cell phone, the BlackBerry 5810, that ran on the GSM network and used GPRS for its email and web capabilities. RIM also gained a reputation for secure communications, which led to the US government becoming its biggest customer and making use of BlackBerry services.

Following the release of the BlackBerry Pearl in September 2006, as well as BlackBerry Messenger software, BlackBerry began attracting many mainstream consumers outside its traditional enterprise userbase, and was influential in the development and advancement of smartphones in this era. The BlackBerry line was for some time also the leading smartphone platform in the US. At its peak in September 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry services subscribers worldwide. In the following years it lost market mainly to the Android and iOS platforms; its numbers had fallen to 23 million in March 2016, a decline of almost three-quarters. In 2013, RIM replaced the existing proprietary operating system, BlackBerry OS, with a new revamped platform called BlackBerry 10, while in 2015, the company began releasing Android-based BlackBerry-branded smartphones, beginning with the BlackBerry Priv.

On September 28, 2016, BlackBerry Limited (formerly Research In Motion) announced it would cease designing its own BlackBerry devices in favor of licensing to partners to design, manufacture, and market. The original licensors were BB Merah Putih for the Indonesian market, Optiemus Infracom for the South Asian market, and BlackBerry Mobile (a trade name of TCL Technology) for all other markets. New BlackBerry-branded products did not manage to gain significant market impact and were last produced in 2020; a new American licensee planned to release a new BlackBerry before it shut down in 2022 without a product. On January 4, 2022, BlackBerry Limited discontinued its legacy BlackBerry software platform services which includes blackberry.net email, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect and Voice Search – BlackBerry devices based on the Android platform were not affected.