Gallery: BlackBerry's Rise and Fall in 10 Phones
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BlackBerry had its breakout moment in 2003 with Quark, the first line of RIM devices to incorporate a phone, email, web, and BBM all in one now-familiar package.
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BlackBerry had flirted with the consumer market before, but the Pearl was its first everyman smartphone. It was compact, included a camera for the first time, and introduced a tiny trackball for freewheeling navigation.
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The Curve was like a grown-up Pearl. Or at least, a wider one, incorporating the trackball into a beefier, more powerful, higher resolution device. Also notable as BlackBerry’s last device before the iPhone.
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When you think of BlackBerry, the Bold is the device that pops into your head. Its most important feature was the iconic, premium look that marked the height of BlackBerry’s powers. At the time, the company had over 50 percent US market share—more than five times the year-old iPhone.
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Oops! Here’s where the wheels started to come off, or more specifically, the trackball. The Storm was BlackBerry’s first fully touchscreen smartphone, and it was a delirious mess. It didn’t even have Wi-Fi. In late 2008.
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Before the Torch’s 2010 release, then-CEO Jim Bastille called it “"a quantum leap over anything that's out there." Nah. Despite cleverly combining a full QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen, extremely poor sales doused the Torch from the start. By now, BlackBerry’s market share was under five percent.
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BlackBerry’s first real stab at a modern operating system, BB10, didn’t come until 2013. The Z10 was its first host body. The hardware was fine. The lack of developer support was not, and never would be.
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By fall of 2014, you at least couldn’t say BlackBerry wasn’t trying everything. The Passport answered the question: Smartphones, but square? Unfortunately, it turns out no one had been asking.
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BlackBerry followed the Passport with the Classic, a nostalgia play—it looked just enough like the Bold—in a market obsessed with the future. The Classic sold well relative to BlackBerry’s other offerings, but that’s not saying much.
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There was a lot to like about last fall’s Priv, including its long-overdue Android operating system, but it was way too little, way too late, for an asking price that was way too high.
