Blackberry


 * Topic:** Blackberry


 * Description:**

====The BlackBerry is a smartphone developed by Research In Motion, a Canadian company which specializes in wireless devices. It made it's debut in 1999 as a pager geared toward professionals, and transformed into what is known as the second most popular smartphone platform today. The BlackBerry uses a software known as BES, or BlackBerry Enterprise Server, to connect with various email organizations and notifies the user when a message has been delivered.====

History of the Blackberry:
Blackberries were among the first mobile devices capable of sending and receiving emails. In fact, that is exactly what they were designed to do. A business called RIM (Research In Motion) knew that pagers would soon become obsolete in the business world and that emails were the way to go. So they designed the Blackberry. Their first successful models were the 850 and 950 which consisted of a screen, QWERTY keyboard, and scroll wheel to make sending and receiving emails as easy as possible. Because the designs of the new Blackberries were still based of old pager designs it was hard to read emails on the smaller screen. So in April 2000 RIM came out with the Blackberry 957. The only difference between the 957 and the previous models was the screen; it was much larger on the 957 which made reading emails easier.

Then in April 2002, when mobile email devices started including the ability to make and receive calls were becoming popular, RIM released the Blackberry 5810, which has the same design as the 957 except now it could make phone calls. The 5810 had major flaws, like its lack of speaker phone and a number pad, and the fact that you had to have an earpiece to use it.

So, in October 2002 RIM came out with the Blackberry 6810 and 6820 which had built in speakers.In 2003 Blackberry coupled with Nokia devices, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS, allowing its technology to be placed in numerous devices. Later in 2003 RIM introduced the Blackberry 7200 which included a colored screen as well as a colored frame instead of the usual black. In order to try to keep up with competitors, RIM released a few more Blackberry designs, all of which looked almost the same as the 7200 but had the capability of speaker phone. It wasn't until later in 2004 that RIM redesigned the entire Blackberry look by giving their phones a different keyboard. Instead of the traditional QWERTY keyboard the Blackberry 7100 series used a mix of T9 and QWERTY by placing two letters on one button.

In 2005 RIM made another huge step in Blackberry technology by coming out with the 8700 series which featured SEND and END buttons as well as a QWERTY keyboard.  In 2006 RIM introduced the Blackberry Pearl which had a camera built into it, a trackball, color screen, and a colored body. The newest Blackberries were designed after the Pearl and some are even touch screen, like the Blackberry Storm.



When the Blackberry first appeared in 1999 it was vastly different from the device that is so widely used today. It started out as a two-way communicator device designed primarily for business professionals. RIM, the company behind the Blackberry line of smartphones, pioneered the use of a technology called “Push” as early as 2001. This allowed emails to be “pushed” to the device immediately, as opposed to being “fetched” at different intervals. The ability to have email at all times, not to mention email that arrives just as fast as it would on a computer, quickly became something that was desired by business professionals. The Blackberry was sold as a device that was essential to the “road warrior” of today’s business world; even though they could be thousands of miles away from the company they could still check email as easily as if they were in their office. Businesses were quick to see the advantages of having their employees connected at all times to the company email systems, a service Blackberry was providing more successfully than competing companies such as Palm.
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In 2006, RIM launched the 8100 series Blackberry, better known as the Pearl. This was the first device that was aimed squarely at the average consumer. The idea was to introduce a whole new segment to the advantages of the Blackberry outside of the business world. It turned out to be a huge success and Blackberry was able to sell it to consumers that wanted the features it provided (small business owners, college students, etc.) but had previously not been sold on what was largely seen as a business-only device at the time.

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 * Terminology:

** **Smartphone** - A mobile phone offering advanced capabilities, often with PC like functionality

**Push-email** -  describes an e-mail system that provides an always-on capability, in which new e-mail is actively transferred (pushed) as it arrives by the mail delivery agent (MDA) to the mail user agent (MUA), also called the e-mail client.

**Thumbing** - The act of typing on a small keyboard solely using thumbs

**Push-to-Talk** - A service option for cell phones which allows the user to use their cell phone as a walkie-talkie

**Trackball** -  a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes

**Touchpad** -  a pointing device consisting of specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on screen

**RIM (Research In Motion)** - A Canadian wireless device company

**BlackBerry Models** - Pearl, Bold, Curve, Tour, Storm

media type="custom" key="5318079" One of the newest Blackberry Smartphones
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