Blackberry (phones)

BlackBerry 8820, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Classic - by Kt38138 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

BlackBerry is a line of smartphones, tablets, and services originally designed and marketed by Canadian company BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion, or RIM). It is a product name, though many people think it is the company's name.

Research in Motion first offered their Inter@ctive Pager 900 in 1996. It was a clamshell (flip) device that allowed two-way paging. Their first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, in January 1999 which integrated email.

A number of other names had been considered for that integrated model, including "LeapFrog" because the company considered the device to be "leaps and bounds" over everything else on the market. EasyMail, MegaMail and ProMail were also considered as well as "Strawberry" because the tiny keys resembled seeds. But when someone felt the word "straw" sounded slow and negative. The name BlackBerry was coined by the marketing company Lexicon Branding and BlackBerry with its internal second capital B name was chosen due to the resemblance of the keyboard's buttons to that of the drupelets that compose the blackberry fruit, as well as the popular device color of black.

President Obama famously fought to keep his BlackBerry phone and the product had a loyal following in its time. It picked up the nickname of "CrackBerry" because of its addictive nature.