I woke up this morning to find an awesome little surprise in my inbox. Bay Street technology analyst Tom Astle sent me this photo of the first commercial version of a RIM qwerty device!
Yeah, not what you were hoping to see, right? But it sure brings back memories. The device shown here is actually the original BlackBerry 950, sold by BellSouth in the USA. It ran on the Mobitex network owned by Motient Corp. It had a super fast 8 Kb/s data modem inside. Don’t laugh – it was more than fast enough for email and PIN to PIN messaging (which then became BBM).
RIM also had another version of this called the RIM 850, which looked exactly the same but ran on another proprietary data network called DataTAC. If you owned one of these puppies and had service by Bell Canada, you were on that network. Just like GSM and CDMA are incompatible, Mobitex and DataTAC were also incompatible.
This thing ran on AA batteries and you wouldn’t need to change the battery for about 3 weeks. I never owned one of these. My first BlackBerry was the 957, the very next model after this one. It had a larger screen and ran on a rechargeable battery instead of AA cells. Battery life was still about 1 to 1.5 weeks. Today we feel good when we get a single day from our phones. Man, how things change.
2 days until the big BlackBerry 10 launch.
Hi, I'm Chris Umiastowski. I'm a 10-year veteran of sell side equity research and this is where I come to connect with friends on all things related to tech investing.
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Chris, the most interesting part of that picture is the stock information
LOL. I thought it was a pretty funny email this morning. Of course I had to click to download the pic, so there was a bit more suspense compared to this blog post, where the pic is right beside the paragraph. Tom has a great sense of humour.
Chris are you as puzzled/disappointed/surprised as I am that BlackBerry isn’t having their phones available in the US until March? Is this a smart strategy, and did they have any control over it? (I would think they would have been all over the carriers to give them plenty of time to get it tested to launch the same time as Canada and the UK?) What is really behind this and how much will it hurt them? To me that is the big negative takeaway from today’s launch and put a damper on an otherwise excellent product with tremendous hype and build-up to the launch. That, and Thor was pretty robotic in his delivery. I know he’s the CEO and has done a great job of executing, but he just isn’t the best presenter…by far. It just seemed like with all the hype, the DELIVERY of the presentation could have been so much stronger.
If anyone is looking for one I actually have two of these sitting in my closet. I use to do the tech support on these when they first came to Arizona. I can’t speak to weather or not they work but I’d be willing to part with them.
LOL AA batteries.
Bobby, please shoot me an email.
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