#blackberry

We went from black and white to colored displays, monophonic to polyphonic ringtones, SMS to MMS, Blackberry Messenger, and emails -- all the way to installing apps into our phones (remember installing JoikuSpot in your Nokia phone so you can enable hotspot on your 3G connection?). Mobile giants like Blackberry made a killing with the early smartphones. Blackberry Blackberry's claim to fame was its Messenger service and smartphones that featured keyboards that critics loved. Unfortunately, like Nokia, it held on to these early strengths too long and couldn't survive the onslaught of the iOS and Android OS and was also late into the game with its own Blackberry 10 OS. So it pivoted to using Android in 2015 and outsourced its production to TCL Corporation, eventually moving all aspects of the Blackberry mobile business and granting TCL a global license to produce and sell Blackberry smartphones. This license expired in 2020, and it looks like there's a slim chance we'll get to see a Blackberry branded smartphone in the near term. Blackberry Limited, formerly known as Research in Motion, pivoted itself to become a cybersecurity software company. BlackBerry has recently announced entering into a patent sale agreement with Catapult IP Innovations Inc., a Delaware company. Read more in our articles including "Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, LG, HTC, Sony: What went wrong?" and "BlackBerry to sell legacy patents for USD 600M".