How many people remember BlackBerry? The last BlackBerry was the Key2 licensed by TCL in 2018, while the blackBerry phone recently used in the Concise Science Guide was the 2015 Passport2.
As a once brilliant mobile phone brand and operating system, BlackBerry has disappeared into the long river of history along with many brands such as Microsoft Windowsphone, Benmai Palm and Nokia Symbian.
Before apple, Samsung and other technology giants divided the world, the Canadian mobile phone brand BlackBerry also occupied the world's first place, and was also the most popular smartphone brand. Although the Generation Z people born after 2000 may not have seen many BlackBerrys, the recent news that the rise and fall of BlackBerry and its predecessor Research in Motion (RIM) is about to be remade into a movie, when we will be able to see the Era of BlackBerrys before Apple, Samsung and others competed for supremacy.
The screenplay will be adapted from the best-selling book "Lost Signal: Behind blackBerry's extraordinary rise and heroic decay, the untold story behind The Extraordinary Rise and Magnificent Decay" written by The Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff in 2015, released in Canada by Elevation Pictures. The plot will tell the story of how the once ubiquitous and popular BlackBerry mobile phone rose to prominence, how it fell into legal disputes, and finally collapsed.
The 2000s rose rapidly, but eventually became the tears of the times
If you were told in 2011 that BlackBerry would no longer produce any phones in 10 years, no one would believe it.
Strictly speaking, BlackBerry can only be regarded as the "small print" among mobile phone manufacturers, and the first mobile phone with a QWERTY keyboard was first launched in 1998. Introduced in 1999, the BlackBerry 850 added powerful e-mail capabilities, wireless network communication capabilities, and even data protection features, and was popular with the political elite, from former US President Barack Obama to the Queen of the United Kingdom.
The event that brought the BlackBerry to the world's attention was the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, when local communications in New York failed, but the BlackBerry still provided a smooth network to send and receive messages, thus making it famous. By 2005, BlackBerry had 4 million users, 200,000 of whom were dignitaries. By 2006, BlackBerrys accounted for 48% of the U.S. market, and the global market was nearly 20%, becoming the world's first.
But in 2007, BlackBerry's competitor got in — the Apple phone. Maybe the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but Apple gradually changed the face of smartphones; Unlike the popular number keys or QWERTY keyboards of the time, the iPhone had a 3.5-inch capacitive screen that relied entirely on finger touch. But the stubborn BlackBerry still insisted that "not everyone can get used to typing on a piece of glass" and continued to use a physical keyboard.
With the iPhone's huge success, BlackBerry began experimenting with imitating the iPhone in 2008, releasing the Blackberry 9500, but with a bulky shape and a dangerously explosive resistive touchscreen. By 2011, although BlackBerry still achieved good revenue this year, some analysts were already doubting BlackBerry's competitiveness.
After changing its name from RIM to BlackBerry, BlackBerry still can't turn the tide, from losses, layoffs, to involvement in patent disputes, the new Android machines that try to launch have also been flooded by the wave of smartphones, and the operating system and cloud services have also ended operations.
After 2020, TCL, which authorized the production and manufacture of BlackBerry mobile phones, also announced that it would not launch new machines, and Since then, BlackBerry mobile phones have entered history.
What about BlackBerry? They are still there, just focusing on software development, and the in-vehicle operating system BlackBerry QNX, which is mainly used as a driving assistance and vehicle safety system, will also enter the electric vehicle market in the future.
But the new movie probably won't talk about it that much, because the original is only written in 2015. But audiences can look forward to seeing the heights reached by the blackberry empire before it collapsed, and the key drama of going downhill step by step.
The release date has not yet been determined, but it will be released as soon as 2023.