I want to tell you about BlackBerry. Not the company stats version. Not the “here’s what went wrong” tech blog version. The real version — the one where you actually understand why people were so attached to these phones that they nicknamed them “Crackberry” and meant it as a compliment.
Because I think BlackBerry gets talked about the wrong way a lot of the time. People hear the name and they jump straight to the ending. The iPhone showed up, BlackBerry lost, moving on. And yeah, that happened. But that framing completely skips over the part where BlackBerry was genuinely, deeply, LIFE-CHANGINGLY good. The part where millions of people woke up every morning and reached for one of these things the same way they’d reach for their coffee. The part where Barack Obama became president of the United States and basically said “you can have my nuclear codes but you are NOT getting my BlackBerry.” That part matters. That part is the whole story.
So let’s actually talk about it.
The BlackBerry 850 — The One That Started Everything (1999)
Okay so before BlackBerry was a phone brand it was a pager. And I know some of you just made a face reading that word but stay with me because what they did with this thing in 1999 was genuinely wild for the time.
The 850 could not make phone calls. It had a tiny screen, ran on a single AA battery, and by every standard we’d use today it was hilariously simple. But here’s what it could do — receive and send real email, wirelessly, in real time, right there in your hand. Not on your desk. Not when you got back to the office. Right now. Right here. While you were standing in an airport or sitting in a cab or waiting for a meeting to start.
For the business world in 1999 that wasn’t just convenient. That was REVOLUTIONARY. The kind of people who got their hands on the 850 early — lawyers, Wall Street people, executives who lived and breathed their email — reacted to it the way you react when something solves a problem you’d been quietly dealing with your whole career without ever thinking it could actually be solved.
Oh and the name? BlackBerry? That came from the keyboard. A designer looked at those small round keys and thought they looked like the seeds on a blackberry fruit. And that’s how one of the most recognizable brand names in all of tech was born — from someone squinting at a keyboard and going “huh, that kind of looks like a berry.” I love that so much. RIM’s revenue jumped 80 percent after this thing launched which tells you everything you need to know about the nerve it hit.
The BlackBerry 5810 — Okay Now It’s a Phone (2002)
Three years later BlackBerry made the jump to an actual phone with the 5810. And here’s where I have to tell you something that I genuinely find hilarious and endearing at the same time — it was a phone, but it didn’t have a speaker. If you wanted to make a call you had to plug in an external headset. So it was technically a phone in the same way that a car without wheels is technically a car.
But honestly? I don’t even say that to make fun of it. Because when you understand WHO was buying this thing and WHY, the no-speaker thing makes a kind of sense. The people lining up for the 5810 were not buying it to have conversations. They were buying it because it had the BlackBerry email system AND cellular data AND a full keyboard all in one device. The calling part was almost a bonus feature to them. These were deeply focused, productivity-obsessed professionals and the 5810 was basically their dream device even with the headset situation.
It ran on 2G, had a 160×160 monochrome display, and it sat very comfortably in the hands of some of the busiest people in the world. Earpiece and all.
The BlackBerry 7290 — Color, Bluetooth, and Finally Feeling Modern (2004)
The 7290 doesn’t get talked about enough and that genuinely bothers me a little. Because this phone was the moment BlackBerry stopped feeling like a very fancy pager and started feeling like an actual modern device.
Two things arrived with the 7290 that sound pretty small when you list them out but felt enormous at the time. First — a proper color screen with an LED backlight. Earlier color BlackBerrys had existed but the backlight was so dim that the screens looked washed out and kind of sad. The 7290’s screen actually looked good. Text was clear and sharp and the whole experience of looking at your phone felt different in a way that’s hard to fully describe until you’ve gone from a dim screen to a bright one and felt that immediate relief.
Second — Bluetooth. Which if you remember the 5810 and its whole external headset situation, you’ll understand why this was such a meaningful addition. Now you could pair a wireless earpiece and just… use your phone like a normal person. Revolutionary in its own quiet way.
It was also the first BlackBerry that worked properly across international networks which for the kind of road-warrior executives who lived on these things was genuinely huge. The 7290 was the phone that made BlackBerry feel like it had properly grown up. And it deserves way more credit for that than it usually gets.
The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 — The Day BlackBerry Said “We Want Everyone” (2006)
Here’s where the story gets really interesting. By 2006 BlackBerry had built a very specific reputation. Serious. Corporate. The phone for people in suits who needed to answer emails at 11pm. And that was a real audience and they served it well. But RIM looked at the market and decided they wanted MORE than that. They wanted the students. The young professionals. The people who wanted something cool, not just something functional.
So they made the Pearl.
And oh my gosh was it different. The Pearl 8100 was SLIM. It had a trackball on the front — that little pearl-shaped ball that gave it its name — instead of the thumbwheel that previous BlackBerrys had used. It came with a camera. A media player. Bluetooth. A real web browser. It was small and stylish and approachable in a way that previous BlackBerrys simply weren’t. If you walked into a phone store and didn’t know anything about BlackBerry, the Pearl was the one that made you stop and look.
For a lot of people this was their very first BlackBerry. Not because their company gave it to them — because they chose it. Because it looked cool. Because their friend had one and it seemed fun. The Pearl was the first time BlackBerry truly reached outside its own audience and grabbed people who would never have described themselves as “BlackBerry people” before. That is not a small thing. That is a brand growing in real time and it was genuinely exciting to watch.
The BlackBerry Curve 8300 — The One That Made BlackBerry a Household Name (2007)
Okay. If you grew up in the late 2000s and someone says “BlackBerry” to you, this is probably the phone that comes to mind. The Curve. Specifically that slightly compact, slightly rounded, incredibly reliable little device that seemed like literally everyone had at some point.
The 8300 launched in 2007 and it had everything. Full QWERTY keyboard. Camera. GPS. Media player. A design that genuinely felt comfortable and natural to hold. And it was more affordable than the Bold which meant it reached people that the higher-end BlackBerrys never quite got to. But the real reason the Curve became what it became — the reason it turned BlackBerry from a business tool into a CULTURAL MOMENT — was BBM.
BlackBerry Messenger. I need you to really sit with this for a second because BBM was doing things in 2007 that the rest of the world didn’t catch up with for years. Read receipts. Instant delivery. Real-time chat. All of it, before WhatsApp existed, before iMessage existed, before any of that. And it only worked between BlackBerry users which meant that having a BlackBerry wasn’t just having a phone — it was being part of a network. People shared their BBM PINs like they shared their phone numbers. Not having one meant missing conversations that everyone around you was having.
At the peak of all this in 2009 BlackBerry had something like HALF of the entire US smartphone market. Half. The Curve family — the 8300 and all its cousins across different carriers — was carrying a massive chunk of that. These phones were on trains, in coffee shops, in high school hallways and boardrooms and everywhere in between. The sound of someone typing on a BlackBerry keyboard became genuinely part of the soundtrack of that era. The Curve didn’t just succeed. It became part of how a whole generation kept in touch.
The BlackBerry Bold 9000 — BlackBerry Going All Out (2008)
If the Curve was the heart of BlackBerry, the Bold 9000 was the soul. This was the one where they took everything they’d ever learned and put it all together without cutting a single corner and said — here. This is what we can do.
Pick up a Bold 9000 and you felt it immediately. The weight of it. That solid, substantial feeling that said this is not a toy. The back was a faux leather texture that felt genuinely premium under your fingers in a way that was unusual for phones at that time. The front was polished and purposeful. And the keyboard — I have to be careful here because I really want to do this justice — the keyboard on the Bold 9000 was one of the greatest physical keyboards ever put on a mobile device. Full stop. The spacing between each key. The travel when you pressed down. The satisfying click of each letter. Your thumbs just knew where to go and everything came out right. Typing on a Bold 9000 felt like it was working WITH you instead of making you work for it.
The specs backed up the feel too. A 480×320 display that matched the original iPhone’s resolution at the time. 3G. GPS. A 3.5mm headphone jack. Solid battery life. And that push email system running flawlessly in the background like it always had, delivering messages the second they arrived like a very reliable and extremely prompt personal assistant.
Barack Obama got his first BlackBerry around this time and when people suggested he give it up after he became president he basically said over my dead body. When the leader of the free world refuses to hand over his phone even after being given every national security reason to do so — that tells you something about how it felt to use one of these.
The BlackBerry Storm 9530 — The One We Don’t Talk About (2008)
I’m going to be honest with you about the Storm because I think it deserves honesty more than it deserves mockery. In 2008 the iPhone had just arrived and the entire phone industry was in a mild panic trying to figure out how to respond. BlackBerry looked at the touchscreen world Apple had just opened up and decided they needed to step into it.
The Storm 9530 was a full touchscreen BlackBerry. No physical keyboard. And to their credit they tried something genuinely creative to solve the problem of typing on glass — they made the entire screen a physical button. Every tap was also a click. They called it SurePress and the idea was that you’d get real tactile feedback on a touchscreen, which was something nobody else was offering.
In theory that’s actually pretty clever. In practice the execution just wasn’t there. The screen flex felt weird and imprecise. The software had bugs that really should have been caught before launch. And the overall experience felt like a first draft that had been sent out into the world a few months too early. Reviews were genuinely rough and while it sold pretty well initially on the strength of the BlackBerry name, word of mouth caught up fast.
The Storm wasn’t a bad IDEA. It was just a device that arrived before it was truly ready. And what it really proved was something that BlackBerry probably already knew deep down — they were better at being BlackBerry than they were at being Apple. Nothing wrong with that. But it took the Storm to make it fully clear.
The BlackBerry Bold 9900 — The Greatest One They Ever Made (2011)
Some devices are great. Some devices are the best version of what a company has ever done. The Bold 9900 is the second kind for BlackBerry and I genuinely believe that most people who ever owned one would say the same thing without hesitating.
Released in 2011, the 9900 did something that felt almost obvious in hindsight but took real courage to commit to — it kept the physical keyboard AND added a touchscreen. Both. At the same time. Not as a compromise and not as a gimmick. Just as two genuinely useful things that worked together beautifully. You could swipe and scroll on the screen and then drop your thumbs to the keyboard and type with a precision that no touchscreen keyboard has ever quite matched.
The keyboard itself was somehow even better than the already incredible 9000. Thinner keys, better spacing, a click and a texture that keyboard fans still describe with this kind of reverence that I think would sound dramatic if it wasn’t completely earned. It was faster than previous Bolds. Thinner too. It had NFC, a 5-megapixel camera, 8GB of storage. It felt modern and premium and completely intentional in every detail.
Here’s what gets me about the 9900 though. It came out in 2011. Four years later BlackBerry would announce it was getting out of the hardware business entirely. So in a way this phone was BlackBerry at the very top of what they were capable of — and also one of their last real chances to remind everyone of what that was. It’s a bittersweet phone to look back on. The best thing they ever made, arriving just before everything started to come apart.
The BlackBerry Passport — The Weirdest One and Why That’s a Compliment (2014)
By 2014 BlackBerry needed something different. The market had changed dramatically, the app ecosystem on BlackBerry 10 was struggling, and the company needed to make a statement. What they released was the Passport — and the first time most people saw it they genuinely weren’t sure what to make of it.
It was square. Completely, unapologetically square. A 4.5-inch 1440×1440 display that was literally as wide as it was tall, with a full physical keyboard stretching across the entire bottom. It looked like nothing that existed anywhere else in the market and it was clearly designed for a very specific kind of person — the one who spent their workday reading long documents, managing spreadsheets, living in email threads that went on for days.
For that person? It was almost perfect. Reading anything on that wide square screen was genuinely better than on any regular phone because of how much horizontal space you had without losing the text size that makes reading comfortable. The keyboard was wide and spacious and lovely to type on. The battery life was excellent. And the whole thing had this confident strangeness to it — like BlackBerry had decided to stop trying to compete with iPhone and just make exactly the device that their most devoted users actually needed.
It sold better than most people expected. Not a mainstream hit but a deeply loved niche device. And I think that’s actually kind of beautiful. In a market full of phones that all looked basically the same, BlackBerry made a square one and meant it completely and found the people who needed it. The Passport is the phone that proved BlackBerry still had real creativity left even in the difficult years.
The BlackBerry Priv — The Goodbye That Deserved Better (2015)
The Priv is the bittersweet one. Released in 2015 as the first BlackBerry to run full Android, it was genuinely excellent and it came along right at the moment when it was already almost too late.
The design was a slider — a big 5.4-inch curved display on the front with a physical QWERTY keyboard that slid out from behind the screen when you needed it. The build quality was premium. The security features were among the best on any Android device that year. The keyboard was satisfying. The camera was capable. For a window of time it felt like BlackBerry had actually found the path forward — a way to carry everything that made them special into the Android world that had clearly won.
But the price was high and the competition was fierce and the sales didn’t come the way they needed to. And not long after the Priv launched, BlackBerry announced it was done making its own hardware. They were going to license the brand to other manufacturers and focus on software and security instead.
I think about the Priv a lot when I think about BlackBerry because it was such a genuinely good phone that arrived at such a hard moment. It deserved a longer run than it got. It was BlackBerry’s last real swing at the game on their own terms and it was a really good swing. The timing just didn’t cooperate.
The BlackBerry Key2 — One Last Beautiful Thing (2018)
After BlackBerry handed hardware production over to TCL, two keyboard Android phones came out — the KEYone in 2017 and then the Key2 in 2018. And the Key2 especially was something worth paying attention to.
TCL had clearly listened to the people who used the KEYone and heard every piece of feedback they gave. The keys on the Key2 were 20 percent bigger than the KEYone’s, matte finished instead of glossy, and had a tactile click that was specifically modeled on the Bold 9900. The Bold 9900 — the greatest BlackBerry keyboard ever made. That was the reference point they aimed for. And when you typed on the Key2 you could feel that they’d genuinely tried to get there.
The Snapdragon 660 processor and 6GB of RAM made everything smooth. Dual cameras. A Speed Key that let you jump between apps with shortcuts. Battery life that lasted well past a full day. It was a genuinely solid phone even outside of the BlackBerry context — but inside the BlackBerry context, for someone who had grown up typing on those keyboards and missed that feeling every single day, it was something really special.
TCL’s license ended in 2020. In January 2022 BlackBerry turned off support for all its older devices and that was really it. The final chapter, quietly closed.
What I Want to Leave You With
BlackBerry didn’t fade because they made bad phones. Most of the phones in this article were genuinely great — some of them were among the best devices of their era. They faded because the world moved in a direction that was really hard to move with while also staying true to what they were. And I think there’s something real and human and a little heartbreaking in that.
But more than the ending, I want you to think about everything before it. The 850 putting email in people’s pockets before anyone thought that was possible. The Curve becoming the soundtrack of an entire era. BBM connecting people in ways that felt almost magical at the time. The Bold 9900 delivering the best typing experience any phone has ever offered. The Passport being square and weird and wonderful and not apologizing for any of it.
BlackBerry earned the love people gave them. Every tap of that keyboard, every BBM ping, every satisfying click — that was a company genuinely trying to make something good. And for a long stretch of time they did exactly that.
That’s worth remembering. I think about it more than you’d probably expect me to.
Thank you so much for reading this one. It was a joy to write.