The evolution of the BlackBerry

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Since its debut in January 1999, the BlackBerry series of devices has come an awfully long way.

BlackBerry started off its life as a handful of relatively advanced pagers before becoming the smartphone giant that we now know so well, but it’s not just the devices themselves that have changed over the years. The audience has changed significantly, too.

Although still primarily considered a business communications device by large chunks of the media and the general population - the image of the businessman/woman turned into a twitching, ragged obsessive thanks to their CrackBerry addiction isn’t one that’s disappeared – nowadays it’s not uncommon to see a BlackBerry in the palm of a teenager.

The media’s frequent stance may have led to you to believe that they’re only contacting drug dealers or members of some shady street gang to do over a nearby old lady’s house, but the convergence of smartphone trends and unavoidably youth-orientated social networks shouldn’t be dismissed so easily. The two are becoming progressively more interlinked.

Research in Motion’s (RIM) own figures attest to this widening of audience, too. At present, over 50 per cent of its 32 million worldwide subscriber accounts are non-business, but in Q2 FY10 – roughly equating to June-August 2009 – more than 80 per cent of its new customers were non-business accounts.

You might shrug this off and say that more businesses are taking on the iPhone as their company phone of choice, but BlackBerry’s strong sales, with 3.8 million accounts started up in that quarter, suggest doing so hides the full story.

Indeed, Gartner’s Q2 2009 figures demonstrate that RIM is tightening its grip on a hefty proportion of the smartphone market, with an 18.7 per cent share in Q2 2009, up from 17.3 per cent in Q2 2008.

It’s all in the phone

This is pretty impressive when you consider that although the smartphone market has been expanding, the competition has expanded exponentially too, with Google's Android and now webOS devices out for their slice of the pie.

However, Android devices, seen by many as the most likely competitor to the iPhone’s smartphone crown, have had to be made from the ground up within the smartphone boom – not to mention the explosion of touchscreen devices. Meanwhile, at heart, BlackBerry devices have always mined the same formula.

RIM’s vice president of product management Carlo Chiarello summed this up neatly by explaining that whatever form factor changes occurred within the BlackBerry line-up, each device would remain ostensibly a “communication device”.

Such a simple, grounded outlook is refreshing, having lived through the megapixel wars of the past few years - the fierce and expensive fight to create the best camera phone - made largely futile in the purest sense by the fact that all the top contenders are without an optical zoom.

Back to square one

If you look back to one of the first BlackBerry devices that fully incorporated phone functionality, the 6210, you can see that far more than just a kernel of the design of current BlackBerry devices is in evidence, despite being released the best part of a decade ago.

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