BBM pioneered a way to let users know that their messages were both delivered and read via text designations “D” and “R” next to a message. In an era before every cell phone supported MMS messages, you could exchange pictures and files. With BBM, you could talk to individuals one-on-one or in groups.
Whereas a normal wireless user might send a few hundred SMS messages in a month, depending on their wireless plans allowance, BlackBerry users would frequently send and receive hundreds of messages a day.
wireless carriers were charging between five and ten cents a message for, BBM was free, included within the data plan that every BlackBerry user paid for either through their carrier or through an enterprise server agreement with their employer. The brilliance of BBM was that it combined two existing quick messaging paradigms, instant messengers a la AIM and Yahoo Messenger and SMS. By 2011, that number had climbed to over 60 million. BlackBerry Messenger, better known as BBM to its millions of once-devoted fans, was arguably the original "killer app" of the smartphone age and it set the standard for the way we have communicated via text on our phones for nearly 20 years and defined the blueprint for mobile messaging services as we know them.įirst launched by Research in Motion (the company better known as RIM, which would rename itself BlackBerry in 2013) in 2005, the private messaging service had 4 million users in 2008. It is BBM.īefore iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, or whatever mobile messaging strategy Google has decided on this week, there was BlackBerry Messenger.
And although those were endemic to the early success of the first breakout smartphone OS in a pre-iPhone world, the enduring legacy of BlackBerry is something else entirely: it is instant mobile messaging. When you think back on the old BlackBerry smartphones, most people probably think about one of two things: the keyboard and mobile email.
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