You were once never more than six feet from a BlackBerry in London. Everyone was hooked on the devices, from company execs firing off emails in the back of taxis to schoolkids who couldn’t last five minutes without checking BBM. The lightning-fast speeds to exchange messages, coupled with a full, pocket-sized keyboard, ushered in a new era of being permanently online, where everyone communicated round the clock. If you didn’t have a BlackBerry you were simply backward, uncool, a philistine.
From around the turn of the century onwards, annual sales of BlackBerry phones saw near-exponential growth, and with it the world’s thirst to get their hands on the latest devices. The craze transformed Waterloo, BlackBerry’s Canadian headquarters, from a sleepy town home to a large Mennonite community who travelled by horse and refused to use electricity, to a tech powerhouse that was the gravitational centre of the global smartphone industry.
