From the archives: Microsoft KIN, Nokia N70, N90, N91, N8, 5140i, 8800, BlackBerry Pearl 9100

Some product launches are merely bad but the Microsoft KIN (2010) cratered so badly that you you could see it from space. On the other hand, the Nokia N-Series  represented Nokia at its best, starting with the Nokia N70, N90 and N91 (2005) and ending (at least for the Symbian N-Series line) with the N8 just five years later.

April 2005 was a great year for Nokia, with the somewhat rubbery but almost indestructible Nokia 5140i and the elegant Nokia 8800. Back to 2010, and the BlackBerry Pearl 9100 combined RIM's smartphone know-how with a traditional form factor that made it a success.

Image credits: Microsoft, Nokia, RIM

BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2 (2009)

Announced October 2009

Although 2009 had seen the rise and rise of Android and Apple smartphones, it’s easy to forget that they were still only quite small players in that market. When it came to smartphones that were actually used as smartphones – because many of Nokia’s Symbian devices were only used as feature phones by owners – then the company to beat was Research In Motion and their line of BlackBerry devices.

The killer application on the BlackBerry platform was messaging – no other smartphone had quite the capabilities when it came to email or instant message, and for this reason BlackBerry devices were extremely popular. So when RIM announced two significant devices in October 2009 they were at the top of their game.

BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is one of the best classic BlackBerry devices ever. A useful evolution over the Bold 9000 launched the previous year, the 9700 had everything a smartphone should have, including 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS, a decent camera and good multimedia support. This classic BlackBerry had a physical QWERTY keyboard that fans loved plus the useful addition of a very usable small trackpad which made the whole user experience much better.

Both corporate and private users bought the 9700 in significant quantities, and it did seem that sticking to the classic BlackBerry formula was working well for RIM in the face of their upstart rivals.

Where the Bold 9700 built on success, the BlackBerry Storm2 was a follow-on to failure. The original BlackBerry Storm – released in 2008 – was a disaster. Poorly conceived and implements, the Storm was critically panned and unsurprisingly didn’t sell. The Storm2 fixed many of the problems of the original, including re-engineering the touchscreen display, including WiFi, fixing the software and fitting a better camera. As a result, the Storm2 was at least usable… but the specification was a year out of date when it hit the market and it was only a modest success.

In the end, the success of the Bold 9700 masked the disappointing sales of the Storm2. Although this didn’t look like a bad result, the problem was that RIM didn’t have a next-generation product that could complete with the new generation of smartphones coming out. It would take more than three years to produce a real successor to the classic BlackBerry platform, and that was a catastrophe that made even the original Storm look small in comparison.

Image Credits: RIM / BlackBerry

Videos: BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2

 

BlackBerry Storm 9500 (2008)

Launched November 2008

By late 2008 it was nearly two years after the launch of the original iPhone, but there was still everything to play for in the newly popular smartphone market. Nokia had launched the 5800 XpressMusic, Google had partnered with HTC to make the T-Mobile G1 and even Windows phones were showing some useful developments. But nothing could quite manage the polish and attention to detail that Apple had.

So when RIM started working on a touchscreen device there was much anticipation that their expertise would come up with something class leading. When the BlackBerry Storm 9500 was announced in a blaze of publicity and it was dubbed an “iPhone Killer”.

On paper it looked pretty good. The screen was a bit smaller than the iPhone but had a higher resolution, the camera looked promising, it had GPS support, a removable battery and expandable memory but for some baffling reason there was no WiFi. Expectations about the software were very high, RIM having gained a reputation for making an effective platform for both businesses and consumers.

In reality the BlackBerry Storm was a disaster. One of the main problems was the screen – instead of making a simple touchscreen, RIM had tried to reproduce the feel of a traditional keypad using a system called SurePress, which simulated having to press down on the screen to do something. It was awful, in particular when used with the virtual keyboard. But it didn’t stop there, the entire user interface was a badly-implemented rehash of traditional BlackBerries and it lacked the ease-of-use that Apple was offering. Despite the proven strengths of RIM’s software offerings, the user experience was pretty abysmal.

But there was more – the camera should have been better than the iPhone but really only produced fuzzy approximations of real life, the lack of WiFi turned out to be a big deal, it was slow and had limited memory, and it was much chunkier than the iPhone to carry about.

In short, it was a disaster. Famously, Stephen Fry gave it a withering review while at the same time praising the BlackBerry Bold 9000, concluding that “the Storm could teach an industrial vacuum pump how to suck”. While other reviewers were perhaps less eloquent, the feelings were very widespread. And although initial sales were not bad, word quickly got around and it was widely recognised for the lemon it was.

RIM took on board the criticisms and fixed at least some of the problems with the Storm2 launched a year later. The Storm2 added WiFi and improved the user interface and tricky SurePress display, but the Storm’s reputation preceded it, and because the Storm2 was basically a bugfix the specifications were looking rather out-of-date in late 2009.

In 2010, BlackBerry tried again with the Torch which combined both the touchscreen and a slide-out physical keyboard. It was a moderate success, and quite popular with existing BlackBerry customers but it didn’t win anyone else over. In 2013, RIM tried again with the all-touch BlackBerry Z10 which ended up as an even bigger disaster than the Bold. Overall, you could say that RIM didn’t have much luck with touchscreen devices.

If you like to collect high-profile failures, the BlackBerry Storm is easy to come by and inexpensive with prices starting at £30 or so for good ones, and up to £90 for “new old stock” with the marginally more useful Storm2 coming in at a little more.


Image credits: RIM / BlackBerry

BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (2006)

BlackBerry Pearl 8100

Launched September 2006

The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 is a best-selling smartphone that you have probably forgotten. Shipping in the millions during 2006 and 2007, the Pearl was a huge sales success, even against mighty devices such as the Nokia N95 and the original Apple iPhone.

A decade ago it was email driving smartphone adoption amongst consumers rather than other factors. Web browsing sucked on 2006-era smartphones because publishers didn't make the mobile versions of websites that they do today. And although you could download applications onto your smartphone it wasn't the easiest thing to do. Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy, so most communication was done by email. And nothing did email better than a BlackBerry.

The Pearl was very much a consumer device, ditching the QWERTY keyboard and wide body (found on the BlackBerry 8700) for a hybrid keypad and a shape much closer to a standard "candy bar" phone. It was the first BlackBerry device to feature a camera (because corporate customers didn't like cameras) and be able to play MP3s and store data on a microSD card (because corporate customers didn't think it appropriate). It was also the first BlackBerry to discontinue the traditional side-mounted jog-wheel and replace it with a trackpad.. not quite as intuitive as a touchscreen but close. It didn't have 3G or WiFi though, but email use didn't really need that.

The screen itself was probably the best in class, and on top of that there were a range of applications available, on what was for the time a highly polished and rather fun operating system. Although BlackBerry purists looked at the Pearl with distaste, it wasn't aimed at them at all.. and it successfully opened up a new market helping to create six years of rapid growth for makers Research in Motion.

Some variations followed over the years, eventually leading to the final model in the series - the Pearl 3G - in 2010. All the Pearls was successful commercial products, but in the end consumers lost interest in this type of device. Today prices for the 8100 vary hugely, ranging from a few euro each to several hundred depending on condition and colour. It seems that even a decade later, this little device still has its fans.

Image credits: BlackBerry / Research in Motion

A Tale of Two Tablets: Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 and BlackBerry Playbook (2010)

Announced September 2010

The concept of a “tablet” had been around for five years or so by September 2010, with the Nokia 770 pioneering the way with modest sales in 2005. However, the launch of the original Apple iPad in January 2010 really defined what people expected from a tablet, and the iPad rapidly went on to be a huge success.

Of course, other manufacturers wanted a slice of this market and two of the earliest competitors were quite similar to each other - the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 and the BlackBerry PlayBook. However, neither of these could match the success of the Apple product for somewhat different reasons.

Both the Galaxy Tab and the PlayBook shared similar form factors, each using a 7” 1024 x 600 pixel panel and coming in at about half the weight and footprint of the original iPad. Both devices were available in either WiFi-only or (eventually) cellular versions, but they both ran very different operating systems.

Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000

Samsung's first Android tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 was an Android 2.2 "Froyo" device (upgradable to Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”), which was basically just a straight port of the OS that Samsung had running on their smartphones. This version of Android met with criticism as it wasn’t really designed to run on a big-screen device such as a tablet, to the extent that Google developed the tablet-only Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS that addressed many of those shortcomings.

Unlike the iPad, the original Galaxy Tab was a somewhat bland affair which didn’t have much shelf appeal when it hit the shops shortly before Christmas 2010. Even so, you might expect it to sell in reasonable numbers... but bizarrely it was even more expensive than the iPad to buy, and the Tab stayed firmly on the shelves until Samsung started to discount it heavily.

Overall, the original Galaxy Tab was not a successful product, but Samsung stuck with it and made much better and more competitive devices. Although Apple is still the manufacturer to beat, Samsung have carved out a significant slice of the tablet market five years later.

On the other hand, RIM had taken a different approach with the BlackBerry PlayBook. Although BlackBerry makers RIM were riding high with their traditional smartphones such as the Curve and Torch devices, the operating system on those was ancient and it was never going to be suitable for a tablet device.

Instead, the operating system on the PlayBook was based on QNX, a real-time OS aimed at embedded devices that RIM had acquired earlier in 2010. But QNX wasn’t really a consumer-ready OS, and although it provided a solid platform to build on, it still meant that RIM had to create almost everything from scratch. All rivals Samsung had to do was port Android, this was much harder and it took seven months from the product announcement to units actually shipped in the Spring of 2011.

BlackBerry PlayBook (LTE version)

But when the PlayBook finally did hit the market, it was clear that it wasn’t ready. The operating system was extremely buggy, it had few applications of any real worth and worse still, it could not integrate with BlackBerry email which was the one killer application that RIM did better than everybody else.

Hundreds of thousands of PlayBooks were shipped to the supply chain, where they remained. Take-up of the PlayBook was close to zero, until RIM started to discount units very aggressively. However, PlayBooks clogged up the retail channel for years afterwards and indeed so-called “new” units are still available five years later.

Eventually the QNX-based OS on the PlayBook was developed into BlackBerry 10, which was launched with the BlackBerry Z10 in 2013. But RIM (now just called BlackBerry Ltd) had learned very little from the PlayBook, and sales channels became stuffed with Z10s that nobody wanted, leading to a billion-dollar inventory write-off.

BlackBerry never made another tablet, and by 2015 they are only just hanging on as a smartphone manufacturer. In fact, BlackBerry are now rumoured to be looking at moving to Android, which is really half a decade too late.

Although neither the Tab P1000 nor the PlayBook were a success, the 7” form factor actually was. In 2012 Apple launch the iPad Mini which was much smaller and lighter than the full-sized iPad of the time. And of course there are many, many Android tablets on the market today – but almost all of them are much cheaper than the iPad, which seems to be what consumers actually want.