The Evolution of the BlackBerry, From 957 to Z10 - PC Magazine

The highly anticipated BlackBerry Z10 is the latest step on a long road for one of the world's first smartphone makers. It's a chance for rebirth. If Research in Motion, Waterloo's finest, can pull this comeback off, it'll manage to do something none of its peers has done: Carve out smartphone success for more than ten years running. The major U.S. handheld players ten years ago included Palm, Dell, HP, Nokia, Danger, and RIM. Samsung and HTC were just starting to dabble. What do those first six companies have in common? Four aren't making handhelds any more, and twoâ€"RIM and Nokiaâ€"are working hard to reinvent themselves. When we ran our review of the RIM 957, we classified it as a pager. RIM had already been selling two-way pagers for six years at that point, but it's safe to call the 957 (and its sibling the 950) the first true BlackBerrys: they introduced the QWERTY keyboard and many of the icons and UI elements that would endure for the next decade. The BlackBerry wasn't a smartphone yet, though. That came in 2002 with the BlackBerry 5810, which didn't even have an integrated microphone. You had to wear a headset. It took another year, and the BlackBerry 7230, to deliver a true smartphone. That was almost exactly ten years ago. RIM rode high for the next six years. From 2005 to 2009, the BlackBerry brand dominated the smartphone market in the U.S., with models on every carrier. The OS advanced gracefully, adding media features but staying focused on messaging. Nothing could match BlackBerry's reliability for business customers. We called them "crackberries." But then the company got hit by the one-two punch of touch screens and app stores. Just like Nokia, RIM was stuck with an OS that hadn't been designed for touch, and it stumbled when trying to graft that functionality on, resulting in the embarrassing BlackBerry Storm. Touch worked much better on the Torch a year later, but the menu-heavy OS still had a lot of long lists and small touch targets. RIM also came late to the game of encouraging third-party apps, letting Google and Apple build a strong lead, especially on games. That's a painful irony, as BlackBerrys could install apps long before Apple and Google even made their first phones. RIM has its faithful, and RIM still has a chance. BlackBerry 10 looks like the OS the company has needed for two years now: sleek and touch-centric, but still focused on messaging. Based on QNX, the new OS is prepared for this decade's hardware. We'll have full coverage of the BlackBerry 10 launch on Wednesday, but for now, let's see how we got there. View All Photos in "The Evolution of the BlackBerry, From 957 to Z10" Gallery > via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNH5a5Alrn6ujlPM_cYOBxFuMfKcjw&url=http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/307369/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-from-957-to-z10

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