A new BlackBerry release is scheduled for Friday; it's a movie about the company's rise and fall
If you're not doing anything tomorrow, you might want to catch the new BlackBerry release in the U.S. No, it's not a phone but a movie based on the 2015 book "Losing The Signal" which captures the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of BlackBerry. Starting with its two-way pager, BlackBerry created the mobile email industry making BlackBerry devices the must-have device for any businessman worth his pinstripes. And as the smartphone business started to take off, BlackBerry was right there.
The book also covers the second half of the BlackBerry story, the decline that took place after Steve Jobs introduced the touchscreen iPhone on January 9th, 2007, changing the world. The iPhone was everything a BlackBerry phone was not with its focus on internet content, a virtual keyboard, and a short battery life. But it was a shiny, gorgeous new device that made life easier in ways that BlackBerry devices could not.
And despite several attempts over the next decade+ to merge the convenience of a touchscreen with the precise input capabilities of a physical QWERTY, the BlackBerry smartphone was finally dead and buried as the company pivoted to cyber security and stopped licensing the name.
The BlackBerry movie, simply titled "BlackBerry," opens tomorrow at a theater near you starring Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruchel as Research In Motion (BlackBerry's parent company) co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis respectively. In public, both adopted a "what, me worry?" attitude toward the iPhone with Balsillie saying "As nice as the Apple iPhone is, it poses a real challenge to its users. Try typing a web key on a touchscreen on an Apple iPhone, that's a real challenge. You cannot see what you type."
Lazaridis said in 2008, "The most exciting mobile trend is full QWERTY keyboards. I'm sorry, it really is. I'm not making this up." Yikes.
The BlackBerry story is ultimately about a company that came up with a better mouse trap and was on the tip of every tongue in corporate America. But when the world is at your feet and you're lauded as trailblazers and geniuses by people who are pretty intelligent themselves, you start to think that you can do no wrong. And this was the mindset of Balsillie and Lazaridis when Jobs introduced the iPhone.
Sure, I'd rather see BlackBerry release an Android-powered Passport. But since that's not going to happen (the closest thing is the Unihertz Titan), a movie release about BlackBerry is the best that we get. The film opens in the U.S. tomorrow, May 12th.
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