BlackBerry was a brand of smartphones, designed in Canada. Founded by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in 1984 under name Research in Motion Limited, company developed and produced various communications technologies, networks and advanced solutions. After getting some lucrative investments from both State and private sources, company started to produce consumer devices under BlackBerry brand. Beginning with world’s first two-way pager and radio modem. As for phones, their first phone Pearl 8100 already included latest tech in multimedia and fine camera. Like their many colleagues who made a bet on developing their own operating system, BlackBerry was hurt by rapid spread of Android and iOS. It took them some time and resources to switch to Android, and 2015 model Priv was running on it. But by this time brand’s popularity was already beyond its peak. It dropped from 80 million in 2012 to just 14 in 2017. This forced top management to drop design of new smartphones in favor of licensing to foreign partners. Indonesian BB Merah Putih and Indian Optiemus were first companies to sign on such partnership.
