A Short History Of The Blackberry Smartphone

By Author: Neo Nashville
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The Blackberry, developed and manufactured by the Canadian firm Research In Motion is one of the most popular, and certainly one of the best known, ranges of smart phones on the market today.

Although the BlackBerry brand is now very heavily associated with the smartphone, the first BlackBerry, introduced way back in 1999, was a PDA with a two way paging function.

The first BlackBerry smartphone was released in 2002, and became an instant success, propelling RIM from being a small company on the fringes of the PDA market to being market leaders almost overnight.

A BlackBerry smartphone can be used to send and receive phone calls, text messages, faxes and emails, as well as surfing the web and acting as a personal organiser.

Although there were already several devices on the market, most notably the popular Nokia 9000, that combined a QWERTY keyboard with a mobile phone to give it full PDA functionality, the BlackBerry smartphone introduced a number of innovations which allowed it to steal a march on its rivals within the business market.

Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of the BlackBerry ...
... was its unique ability to send and receive emails, using a technology known as push emailing that automatically forwarded new emails, contacts, and calendar entries from the company server to the unit without the need for manual synchronisation or regular polling.

Another signature feature of the Blackberry was the control surface, which incorporated a small QWERTY keyboard optimised for use with the thumbs alone, and a fascia-mounted tracker ball for navigation, which replaced the side mounted track wheel found on earlier devices.

Another feature on some models was Push-to-Talk, which allowed office style remote conversations to take place across much longer distances, in a similar fashion to an intercom system.

Companies with a large roaming staff, such as sales fleets, were among the biggest champions of the BlackBerry system, as it allowed a mobile workforce to be integrated almost as well as an office, and they were also particularly popular with jet-setting executives, who wanted to be able to stay in touch with their workforce even when they were away on business.

One of the great advantages of the BlackBerry email system is that messages could be written and replied to in circumstances where reception is less than optimal, such as on a train, as the unit can queue information to be sent and received whenever transmission is possible.

A handy feature of the BlackBerry is its trilateration function, which works a little like a GPS device, but without the need for connection to a satellite. It is particularly handy for bosses who need to know the whereabouts of their employees, or for finding people in busy thoroughfares that you have never met face to face before.
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