Tragedy plus time equals a BlackBerry comedy

Posted:
in iPhone
The rise and especially the calamitous fall of BlackBerry precipitated by Steve Jobs and the iPhone is the subject of a new movie, opening in theaters in May.




Six months after it completed post-production and the search for a distributor ramped up, "BlackBerry" is to be released in theaters on May 12, 2023. Written by Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson, the director, it's based on the 2015 non-fiction book, "Losing the Signal."

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star as BlackBerry founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The film is billed as a "whirlwind ride through a ruthlessly competitive Silicon Valley at breakneck speeds."

In the 1990s, Lazaridis and Balsillie created the BlackBerry smartphones that for a time were an astonishing worldwide success. There were mistakes made and clashes within the company, but it was ultimately the iPhone that led to the total destruction of BlackBerry.

{"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"VideoObject","name":"BlackBerry - Official Trailer ft. Jay Baruchel & Glenn Howerton | HD | IFC Films","description":"Opening in theaters May 12 The true story of the meteoric rise & catastrophic demise of the world's first smartphone, BLACKBERRY is a whirlwind ride through a ruthlessly competitive Silicon Valley at breakneck speeds.","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cXL_HDzBQsM/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-03-15T14:01:15Z","duration":"PT2M41S","embedUrl":""}

If you look closely at the trailer, the footage of Jobs announcing the iPhone is clear. What else is clear, is an iMac G4 on a desk.

By 2022, when the BlackBerry film was first announced, the company finally switched off even the ability for existing users to make calls on their phones.

In the US, the film has been bought for theatrical release by IFC Films, while in Canada it will be distributed by Elevation Pictures. A US streamer has not been confirmed, but the film is expected to be shown worldwide on Paramount+ at some point after its run in theaters.

Read on AppleInsider

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    Trailer is good.  Looking forward to this film.  Think my Canadian cousins will hate it tho. (She and her husband literally got their first iPhones this year.)
    edited March 2023 radarthekatAlex_Vwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 2 of 10
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    I bought that book on my iPad when it came out. It’s a great book, with interviews from the CEOs of RIM as well as from other companies, such as Verizon, which was the principle sales terminal for the Blackberry. Once Blackberry made an irretrievable error with their response to the iPhone, with the Storm, Verizon removed their advertising of Blackberry from their network and moved to the otherwise not yet successful Android (remember that campaign? It was towards young men, with aliens, meteoroids, etc). That destroyed Blackberry. They never came back from that.
    radarthekatFileMakerFellerAlex_Vravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 3 of 10
    DAalsethDAalseth Posts: 2,783member
    JP234 said:
    I don't think there's any doubt that the iPhone killed Blackberry. And I doubt there are many people who used Blackberry who don't know that. Most of them realized that there was something way better and migrated to it. I'm surprised that it's still listed on the NYSE. If you bought $10,000 worth in 2018, you'd have all of $2,800 today. If you had bought $10,000 worth of Apple in 2018, you'd have $24,035 today. The smart play was to buy the Apple stock, and use some of your profits for an iPhone!
    I used a BB8500, it was the first Smart Phone I ever held. 
    I hated it.
    Despised it. Bad screen, the little scroll pill navigation was horrible, the apps were awful, I didn’t even like the size and shape of the thing. Work gave it to me for mail, phone, and texting. After a bit I just turned off and hid everything else. I carried it and my own feature-phone and iPod Touch the whole time I worked there. Finally the screen on the BB got cracked, and I turned it in for an iPhone, 3GS I think. It was vastly better. When BB collapsed I was not surprised at all. 
    edited March 2023 JP234radarthekatlolliverFileMakerFellerravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 4 of 10
    I love Palm CEO's take:  

    “We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Colligan said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”

    From Day 1 Apple has been trying to make the best phone possible, Not a "decent" phone and there's where all the windows/palm/nokia/blackberries went to die. 

    JP234radarthekatlolliverFileMakerFellerBart Ychiaravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 5 of 10
    entropysentropys Posts: 4,152member
    BlackBerry’s response to the iPhone was the Storm. A heavy beast with a spongy plastic screen and a response rate slower than a 15 year old Labrador.
    my cousin, a crackberry head, had one. Even he realised it was the end.
    JP234radarthekatFileMakerFellerBart Yravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 6 of 10
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,987member
    Netflix has a comedy series about a fictional last Blockbuster Video store. I can't decide whether that's comically poetic or gratuitously mean, but in the same vein, AppleTV+ really should be the streaming service to carry a film about the rise and fall of Blackberry.
    radarthekatFileMakerFellerBart Yravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 7 of 10
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Trailer is good.  Looking forward to this film.  Think my Canadian cousins will hate it tho. (She and her husband literally got their first iPhones this year.)
    I'm Canadian and I never saw what the fuss was about with Blackberry. They essentially put email on a phone, locked corporate customers in with BBM, and stagnated. I remember looking in to creating apps for Blackberry around 2005, checked their developer kit, and it was a serial port cable which only worked with PCs and a very limited  version of Java with poor quality tools.
    ravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 8 of 10
    auxio said:
    Trailer is good.  Looking forward to this film.  Think my Canadian cousins will hate it tho. (She and her husband literally got their first iPhones this year.)
    I'm Canadian and I never saw what the fuss was about with Blackberry. They essentially put email on a phone, locked corporate customers in with BBM, and stagnated. I remember looking in to creating apps for Blackberry around 2005, checked their developer kit, and it was a serial port cable which only worked with PCs and a very limited  version of Java with poor quality tools.
    A former colleague of mine was a big fan of Blackberry. He loved the way it could change between being a business device during work hours and a personal device during home hours, the ability to load multiple dictionaries to handle different knowledge domains, and a few other things that I have since forgotten.

    He switched to an iPhone with few regrets, though.
    ravnorodomwatto_cobrajony0
  • Reply 9 of 10
    tundraboytundraboy Posts: 1,884member
    Illus1ve said:
    grayskyz said:
    I love Palm CEO's take:  

    “We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Colligan said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”

    From Day 1 Apple has been trying to make the best phone possible, Not a "decent" phone and there's where all the windows/palm/nokia/blackberries went to die. 

    ...but led the social-emoji-insta-glossy-hugescreen-selfie-normie-app-y unification madness post-Steve. Wish the iPhone had remained the widescreen iPod and the Internet communicator it originally was and not turned into a huge sterile brick with an equally sterile UI trying to please just about everybody.
    Well, it pleased a lot of people.  Just not you.  If you want it to remain a widescreen iPod and Internet communicator, just don't use the other functions.  (Also for the complete iPod experience, don't get a wireless phone subscription; WiFi will still work.)
    edited March 2023 williamlondonchiaJP234watto_cobrajony0
Sign In or Register to comment.