No, we aren’t talking about the blackberries you eat. We are talking about a phone plus email. Which was a new idea as the internet stage is upon us.
What is it
It was the year 1990 something and an interactive pager was introduced. What was it exactly? It was a pager that you can reply back from the pager. So it was a two-way paging device. IBM bought up $10 million of these things. It moved on to having your email on your phone. Which was a great thing at the time? Then people could take work everywhere.
Taking the ability to take your email with you was just amazing thing to do. That is how blackberry gained its market share is by focusing on this thing called e-mail and accessing it on a mobile device. They started to offer the email service to non-blackberry users like the Palm Treo.
Smartphone
When the DataTAC network came out this became the first convergent smartphone which offered the following:
- Internet faxing
- Web browsing (yes that world wide web)
- Text messaging
- Phone calls
- Push email
- And more
So in fact that this was the first smartphone in away. It was way beyond the other phones at the time.
My view
I never had one, as I didn’t have a need for it. Yes, it was an awesome phone and it was geared towards the business people in my opinion. Even if I wanted one, I never got it. Over the years they had issues with their network. It was far beyond anything out there at the time.
