THE HOME TO PROPER BLACKBERRY USERS

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Here at Blackberry Centre, our users are real users that use their Blackberries everyday.

We don’t just review for the sake of it, we actually put the devices through their stride.

Blackberries to many seem to be a new invention but the first Blackberry was introduced in 1999. These early devices were nothing more than a glorified pager but did have calendar, organizer, contacts list, paging and Internet capabilities. Blackberries are developed by a Canadian company called RIM ( Research in Motion )

The take up of Blackberry was slow until 2004 when the devices took to a more conventional PDA/smartphone layout and since then, the growth has been strong. From then onwards, Blackberry’s popularity has been going from strength to strength and has in the region of 13 million users worldwide ( still growing ).

What made the Blackberry so popular was the ease of use of the device. One could quite easily operate and email from the device with a single hand - something which the Palm’s and Window PDA’s fail to do ( even up to now ). All Blackberries run RIM’s proprietary operating system called Blackberry OS which is clear, fast and uncluttered.

The Blackberry over the years has accumulated several nicknames including ‘Crackberry’ ( for its emailing addictiveness ), ‘Berry Fingers/Blisters’ ( intense users of the device ) or simply as the ‘Berry’.

RIM ( Research in Motion ) Court Case

In the year 2000, RIM was taken to court over an infringement of patents owned by a company called NTP. Initially, the court rules that RIM had infringed patents owned by NTP and were forced to pay over $50 million dollars in damages.

RIM however appealed and the cased dragged on till 2006 where RIM settled an agreement with NTP for $600+ million. During which time, Blackberry owners were unsure as to what was going to happen to their service if RIM had lost the case.

One swinging point was that there were already vast amounts of government users that were on Blackberries and that it would have been impossible to shut the service down.

Early rumours also surfaced that Microsoft were looking to buy RIM/Blackberry. No official details were released and nothing of the sort happened.

Are we glad now that RIM kept going and as a result has bought mobile email to the masses.

History of Blackberry/Research in Motion/RIM

One of RIM’s offices in the UK. This Blackberry office is based in Egham, Surrey, UK.