Remembering the BlackBerry: the keypad to happiness

Cast your mind back to mid 2008: rhinestones are everywhere, Britney is making an epic comeback and Barack Obama is gearing up to seize the reins. A recession is looming and Twilight has caused a global tween swoon, while Kim Kardashian’s collaboration with Lipsy for Next isn’t even a twinkle in a marketing director’s eye. And yet, despite the fact that Steve Jobs launched the Apple smartphone a whole year earlier, BlackBerry’s stock is at its peak. A few years later, in 2010, when peplum was a thing and Will and Kate announced their plan to get hitched, it still held a huge 43 per cent market share. Why? Because although Jobs’s invention was the most exciting technology around, back then BlackBerry was more than a device. It was a way of life.

This week, as our smartphones ping with reviews of the new iPhone 15, a film is hitting cinema screens to remind us of just that. Tracking the rise and fall of the Canadian brand and its founders with an air of The Thick of It, The Social Network and The Big Short, BlackBerry details how a bunch of Star Wars obsessed nerds led by Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin revolutionised the mobile phone with the help of a cutting, unemployed businessman named Jim Balsillie. Fizzing with wit and drama, it has become one of the ES Magazine team’s favourite films of the year. What it doesn’t do, however, is show exactly how the BlackBerry captured so many of our hearts.

So how did the bulky device and its teeny-tiny qwerty keyboard win us over?

It’s simple, really: as ballsy Balsillie puts it, the BlackBerry sold ‘total individualism’. Yes, pre-BlackBerry we could already make texts and calls on the go, but when the initial devices launched with secure, encrypted access to email, it changed the lives of business people and politicians for good. The trick? Busy folk could now work just about anywhere — or at least pretend to. Nicknamed the ‘CrackBerry’ for its addictive, relationship-ravaging properties, it not only flooded everywhere from the City to newsrooms and Whitehall, but bedside tables, too. Now everything and anything could be blamed on work, allowing users to say, ‘Oh sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ when a partner asked them to take the bins out, the boss queried why they were late or the mother-in-law said a word.

A businesslike status symbol carried by Obama, SATC’s Miranda Hobbes, Anna Wintour and Kim Kardashian (who had three lined up next to her bed), it screeched, ‘I have more important stuff to do!’, so of course this made the rest of us want a piece of the action. The quiet, distinctive click of the keyboard rapidly became a signifier of cultural capital. If you didn’t have BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), you might as well have sent a paper aeroplane carrying your social standing into the void, and as the Girl Boss era crept in, BlackBerry gave anyone with access to a Carphone Warehouse the opportunity to look in-demand, even if you were only furiously texting your mum. Friends? Who needs them when you can look busy deleting spam?

Nevertheless, by 2012 BlackBerry’s market share had dropped to less than 5 per cent and in January 2022 the brand told users the devices would ‘no longer reliably function’. Though it has made a long-lasting impression. After all, before ‘self care’, meditation and quiet quitting went mainstream, the invention of the BlackBerry made it necessary. The pioneer of everything, everywhere, all at once, it decimated our work-life balance in a flash and we leaned right into it. So if you’re wondering why some people believe it’s necessary to hear their iPhone’s keypad, or bash their office keyboard with the vigour of Fred Again, you can blame BlackBerry for that.

‘BlackBerry’ opens in cinemas on 6 October