The Blackberry Evolution

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For many of us BlackBerry is a recent phenomenon but Research in Motion (RIM) have been producing mobile devices since 1999 and have evolved from pagers to brick phones right through to the sleek Curve and Storm models that we know and love today.

Here’s a look at how far they’ve come.

It started with a pager…

BlackBerry’s first device was none other than a two- way pager, the 850.

The pager could send and receive message with up to 16,000 characters and could support email, fax and text-to-voice messages but had no calling capabilities.

The 857/957 Series

Evolving from the pager line and adopting a more PDA style look, the next line increased the display and the memory and added the ability to sync up to 10 emails. It was marketed as a “palm-sized wireless handheld with integrated support for wireless email, Internet, paging and organizer features.”

Introducing Voice Calls

BlackBerry finally introduced voice calling with their next model, the 5810. Although it’s hard to believe, the demand for mobile phones was only just growing. The java-based BlackBerry 5810 packed in a lot of features that we get on our BlackBerry phones today: voice calling, email, SMS text messaging, web browser, organizer,
a J2ME operating system, BlackBerry Enterprise Service and the BlackBerry Web Client.

BlackBerry 6710

BlackBerry 6710 was unleashed in 2002 and made waves in the business market as business users began to notice the appeal of a QWERTY keyboard. It also incorporated voice and data integration and a rechargeable lithium battery.

Rise of an Icon

BlackBerry released their milestone handset, the 6320 in 2002 and has been the core basis for every BlackBerry phone ever since. It was much smaller than its predecessors and featured a bright blue case. As well as introducing 16MB flash memory, 2MB SRAM, large screen, USB connectivity and a backlit screen, the 6320 also allowed support for several file formats including Microsoft Office and Adobe – something which caught the attention of business users everywhere.

The Edgy 8700

The 8700 saw the next step in the BlackBerry evolution, integrating web browsing with the EDGE network for high speed connectivity. More memory, a full QWERTY keyboard, LCD screen and Bluetooth made this a firm favourite in the business world.

A Polished Pearl

BlackBerry slimmed down their handset for the release of the first Pearl handset and packed in some multimedia features including a digital camera, music storage and expandable memory – helping it to appeal to a mass market.

Introducing the Curve

The Curve put BlackBerry on the map and was the lightest full QWERTY phone to be released in 2007. The Curve included a 2megapixel camera with zoom, spell checker, enhanced media player, expandable memory and an enhanced media player.

A Bold move forward

BlackBerry introduced their massively popular Bold 9000 in 2008 and it was unveiled amongst an eager media. The Bold was the first BlackBerry ‘smartphone’ and brought together WiFi, 3G, GPS, high resolution display, expandable memory HTML web browser, digital camera, voice recognition and noise cancellation technology.

Causing a Storm

BlackBerry delivered the first in their Storm series in 2008, and offered their first iPhone rival bringing in social networking support, a vibrating touchscreen, music compatibility across the board, 3.2megapixel camera, GPS Maps and introducing their first touchscreen. Storm 2 also offered mass storage with backup facilities for PC files.

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