Gadgetory

what was the height of cool before the iPhone hit the scene in 2007 maybe for you it was busting out your Motorola RAZR at Warped Tour but for a lot of others it was actually the blackberry but beyond the botanical name and an addictiveness that led observers to call it the CrackBerry the blackberry was actually a very different kind of smartphone from what we're used to today was actually initially marketed to businesspeople as an alternative to lugging around the slow heavy laptops of the late 1990s and early 2000s in fact blackberry employees even gave the devices away for free trials to people that they saw using laptops encouraging them to give the BlackBerry a try because it was an always connected device that would instantly notify the user if they got a new email now because email was quickly becoming a preferred method of communication for businesses a device with push email notifications as well as an ergonomic full QWERTY keyboard that made typing significantly easier than on other handheld devices caught on pretty quickly remember guys this was before touchscreen technology became widespread and all those cellular data speeds at the time were very slow sending and receiving a few lines of text in an email didn't require much bandwidth so suddenly there was this device that was much more convenient than either a laptop or a Palm Pilot which for the earlier models had to be synchronised manually with your PC so blackberries quickly found their way into the hands of executives and politicians everywhere not just for email but also to keep their personal information safe thanks to the additional encryption of blackberry messenger compared to traditional SMS instant messaging this at the stage for the company to keep expanding and eventually release a very successful line of devices that we would recognize today as true smartphones albeit still with the full physical keyboard that became one of BlackBerry's signature features and then the iPhone hit the scene and it didn't take long for the BlackBerry to fade away into obscurity but why was this just a result of hype from Apple's flashy advertisements with white earphones well it turns out that while that may have been a factor blackberry also missed some key indicators about where the industry was headed when the iPhone was announced blackberry was still growing by leaps and bounds and they didn't see the point in trying to compete with a device that they viewed as something for younger less serious consumers and to boot the BlackBerry execs assumed that cell networks simply wouldn't be able to keep up with how much data the iPhone was designed to send and receive instead blackberry decided to keep selling primarily to business users that wanted a secure platform and honestly it kind of seemed to make sense at the time as this was exactly the formula that vaulted blackberry to their position as a major player on the phone scene however business users were much more easily wowed by the iPhone and later Android phones as well then blackberry anticipated not only did the touchscreen centric design of competing phones have more futuristic sex appeal iOS and Android were more open platforms in that Apple and Google designed them specifically with third-party developers in mind that could release thousands of apps to expand their devices functionality blackberry on the other hand continued to rely on first party apps at least in part because it still thought of its phones as just that phones rather than the do at all devices that now dominate the market the death-knell though didn't come until companies started figuring out that the more consumer focused iPhones and Android phones that their employees already owned were just as capable as a blackberry if not more so so at that point turns out businesses just love saving money who knew right they generally started having their employees bring those to work and use them for that too instead of investing in a fleet of BlackBerry's and I mean there were other missteps to remember how controversial Apple's decision to dump Adobe Flash was well although it was inconvenient at the time Apple was ultimately correct that the mobile industry would move away from it but you can learn more about here by the way blackberry on the other hand continued to make supporting flash a priority even though the hardware inside their phones wasn't powerful enough to run it anyway they also stubbornly ignored that consumer sentiment was rapidly shifting toward favoring touchscreens over physical buttons including on the business side so all of this meant that Blackberry went from controlling over 40% of the American smartphone market in late 2009 to zero in 2016 that's right my friends blackberry the company has stopped making their own phones altogether now the BlackBerry name is still around and the flavor of Android that current Blackberry phones run is still being worked on by blackberry but long gone is BlackBerry's custom-built mobile operating system and the phones you see on the market are actually made by other companies under licensing agreements for the name don't feel too sad for blackberry though I tried one once and it was honestly wonderful it was both tart and sweet at the same time I hear it's absolutely fantastic in PI's just not as good as Apple speaking of not as good if you want to make a website that's not as good then don't use Squarespace Squarespace is all-in-one platform makes it easy to build a beautiful website and their award-winning templates mean that you can have a powerful online identity created for yourself in no time at all and if you're worried about like ooh how do I build a website Squarespace provides award-winning 24/7 customer support via live chat and email and you can even just attend a live webinar or check out their help guides they've got tons of resources for you and they've got a bunch of great tools to you can transfer your third-party domains to Squarespace so instead of working with multiple vendors to maintain your online presence you can manage it all in one place with Squarespace and it's never been easier to sell products or services online Squarespace allows you to easily manage your products orders and your inventory so head to squarespace.com forward slash tech quickie and use code tech wiki to get 10% off your first purchase we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow even if you're doing it on your blackberry it's nothing like it's all good you know it's still cool we want black BlackBerry viewers to all six of you