Blackberry (Research in Motion)

Blackberry (formerly Research In Motion – RIM) was once the technological prowess of Canada. The company itself was founded in 1984 in by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. RIM was the first North American company to develop for wireless data technology. While the company dabbled with modems and pagers early on, things really kicked into high gear in 1999 when they released the Blackberry 850, a device that could handle email. The Blackberry 850 was a catalyst that forever changed the mobile world.

From there the company went on to create the most secure handheld devices that were utilized by corporations, governments and consumers. Some notable models were the Blackberry Pearl, Blackberry Bold 9000, Blackberry Torch, Blackberry Z10/Z30 and the more recent Blackberry Passport and Blackberry Priv (the first blackberry to use Android as its operating system). During the company’s peak in 2013 they had 85 million subscribers worldwide. Recently those numbers have dwindled significantly; so much so that the company has moved on from creating their own hardware and have outsourced that to partners.

 I can remember when I was in college and everyone had a Blackberry and used their messaging service (BBM) on the regular. Funny thing is, us guys at Real Man Travels still use BBM as our main messaging service. We have a group chat set up on it and I will legitimately be sad if Blackberry ever shuts their service down.

What is 150 of our favourite Canadian things? Read about it here