Research in Motion (RIM), founded in Waterloo, Ontario, first developed the Interactive Pager 900, announced on September 18, 1996. The Inter@ctive Pager 900 was a clamshell-type device that allowed two-way paging.[12] After the success of the 900, the Inter@ctive Pager 800 was created for IBM, which bought US$10 million worth of them on February 4, 1998.[13] The next device to be released was the Inter@ctive Pager 950, on August 26, 1998. The first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, released January 19, 1999. Although identical in appearance to the 950, the 850 was the first device to integrate email and the name Inter@ctive Pager was no longer used to brand the device.
The first BlackBerry device, the 850, was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager in Munich, Germany.[14] BlackBerry was a solution devised by RIM for delivering e-mail over several different wireless networks.[15] The name BlackBerry was coined by the marketing company Lexicon Branding. The name was chosen out of about 40 potential names, because of the resemblance of the keyboard’s buttons to that of the drupelets that compose the blackberry fruit, and the instant pronunciation which reflected the speed of this push email system
In 2002, the more commonly known convergent BlackBerry 5810 smartphone was released, which supports push email, mobile telephone, text messaging, Internet faxing, Web browsing and other wireless information services.[17]
On January 30, 2013, BlackBerry announced the release of the Z10 and Q10 smartphones. Both models consisted of touch screens: the Z10 features an all-touch design[18] and the Q10 combines a QWERTY keyboard with touchscreen features.[19]
The two major advantages were physical keyboard and unbreakable encryption.
As your own research shows, while they started out as two-way pagers, they fairly rapidly moved into actual phones.
And, in 2010, they were a big deal – as mobile phones with email capability – especially in the U.S., until iPhones and Androids very quickly took over, a few years later.
This sounds like the best explanation. (FYI, I had a Blackberry phone during the first decade of this century and I liked it; the physical keyboard was easier for me to type on than the virtual one on my iPhone.)
“Phone” implies two way voice which was not the primary use at all. It was secure messaging driven…People typing madly on the keyboard with two thumbs. The security made it useful to the govs. The keyboard gave it its name.
It’s funny to look back on movies like Snakes on a Plane or shows like Who Wants to Be a Superhero?. Neither one feels like it was that long ago… except that both featured “smart phones” with physical keyboards, rather than touchscreens, which puts them in an entirely different era from today.
There’s also a series of posters in many university science buildings called “A Century of Physics”, about science and technology changes through the decades of the 20th century. At the bottom of each poster is a picture of a typical phone of the era… and the posters stop just before an iPhone would have been featured on one.
It looks like BlackBerry had a product placement campaign going on around that time:
It looks like this promotion company was working with them from 2007 since the article is dated 2015. That’d put it in the timeframe of this movie. But if it was product placement, it’s odd that there’s a mix of phones being used rather than all of them being BlackBerry phones.
I’m wondering about context. Was the robbery in a rich town?
I do recall referring to phones as “Blackberries”.
They used to be high class, for rich people.
I wonder if he said it in a sarcastic way, like “oh, i wouldn’t want you stain your Gucci jeans”.
By 2010 though, i don’t think Blackberries were a status symbol anymore.
I agree with this and that it was product placement.
I went from a Razr to an iPhone in 2008. It took a couple of years for them to be allowed to be used for work email. It was maybe four years later when there was still one holdout using a BB and they told him they weren’t going to support them just for him.
I definitely had one in 2010 and I’m certain I posted to the SDMB from it!
I don’t remember blackberries ever being a generic term for cell phones in 2010. That was a particularly awful year at the job I was working at and I can definitely remember being told to make certain all cell phones were completely silenced when we had yet another team meeting with some VP.
Did you actually use a Blackberry at that time? Because I did, and I can assure you, it was a fully functional cell phone with two way voice calls. I also had rudimentary internet access, including Mapquest.
Not then no but my associate I worked with did and his brother was/is high up in management.
I was very late coming to using a cell phone at all - had quite enough of landline calls into the office that did I not want to be subservient to.
Still not fond of the requirement to have a phone for everything ….fascinated by the Apple Watch tho.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “strength” - but I suspect what you are talking about is Blackberry messages , which had supposedly had advantages in some ways over both ordinary text messages and email. But that’s just possibly a reason to choose a Blackberry over some other phone just like there was a push to talk cell phone and people chose it because of the “push to talk” . But both also worked as cell phones and people used them differently - in all the years my job forced me to have a Blackberry, I didn’t use it for messaging once. Phone calls , yes. Emails, yes, Navigation ,yes. But not one message.
They probably tossed in ‘BlackBerry’ because, at the time (2010), it sounded slicker and more up-to-date than just saying ‘cell phone.’ BlackBerry was still a well-known brand back then, so it gave the dialogue a bit of cultural flavor. Even though today we’d just say ‘phone’—or maybe ‘iPhone’—back then BlackBerry had a certain cachet that made it feel cooler or more specific than the generic ‘cell phone.’ Filmmakers like to use snappy dialogue (especially for the bad guys). Real life folks, not so much.
I remember that story differently, and as it turns out, incorrectly. This was around the time I got my first iPhone, and I remember thinking to myself, “why is the POTUS messing around with a BlackBerry when we have these new things that are a lot better”? I recall thinking that it must be because he was being forced to keep the BlackBerry because the secret service wouldn’t allow him an iPhone.
