BlackBerry will not manufacture more smartphones : return to a legendary brand – 01net.com

This is the end of an adventure for several decades. John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, has announced that his company was going to stop designing smartphones, and that he would entrust this task to a sub-contractor indonesia, PT Tiphone Mobile Indonesia, with which it will create a joint venture, PT BB Merah Putih.

BlackBerry, formerly RIM-Research In Motion, was founded in Canada in 1984 by Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. In 1996, the brand sells its first product, the RIM 900 Inter@ctive pager, a device used to send and receive written messages, but also access to their e-mails passing through servers RIM, which required a little bit of bandwidth.

J. Sullivan and A. E. Rodriguez Getty Images North America AFP – Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the co-founders of RIM.

The first “smartphone” with the name of BlackBerry is released in 2001. It worked under the operating system BlackBerry OS, which claimed a maximum security. But the same year, RIM should face prosecution for patent infringement. The case will be solved few years later by an agreement with the american authorities. In parallel, the devices of the canadian brand have become objects of fetishes frameworks connected and politicians… including Barack Obama.

In 2007, then released the first iPhone, the BlackBerry has over ten million users and is changing its image. Device for the ” pros “, the BlackBerry becomes a device to fashion thanks to her stint in the television series Gossip Girl. Two years later, 50 million users is achieved. However, financial worries, accumulate to the firm, overwhelmed by the success of smartphones that are all about the touch.

In 2011, the iPhone supplanted the BlackBerry in the heart of the American and RIM announced the dismissal of 11% of its workforce. At the end of the year, several days of outage affecting millions of users around the world. The action tumbles down leading to the departure of the co-founders of the brand. The following year, the problems are increasing in spite of a number of users on the rise.

In January 2013, the BlackBerry Z10, which is supposed to save RIM group, is launched. But it was a commercial failure. Pioneer, RIM, which took in passing the name of the BlackBerry – gliding in the 4^e rank of the OS installed in smartphones, largely supplanted by Android and iOS. At the end of 2013, the sales never-ending fall… John Chen became CEO of the brand. Then arrived the Passport, and then the Android devices that were able to restart the machine. In vain.