The smallest body is proven by its less than two inches wide (50 mm) size and 3.3 ounces (93g) in weight. Like the name suggests, it supports for high-speed 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) networks, Wi-Fi (b/g/n) and GPS. All these are powered by a powerhouse processor that leads to stunning pictures on the high-res and sharp screen.
For ease navigation, it is equipped with an optical trackpad for smooth navigation, media and volume keys as well as a 3.2 Mpx camera with flash and finally supports up to 32 GB of storage.
2001 marked a number of important new partnerships for RIM, too, including VoiceStream (which would ultimately become T-Mobile USA) and Italy's TIM. Maybe more interesting, though, was an announcement the company made at the very tail end of the year: it'd be developing a device compatible with Motorola's iDEN network technology in partnership with Nextel. iDEN's claim to fame, of course, was (and still is) its push-to-talk interface -- so did this mean that a hybrid BlackBerry cellphone was in the works? Smartphones were still a novelty at the time and heavyweights like Microsoft hadn't yet come to play ball, but the synergy was pretty obvious: road warriors do their email and take conference calls from the back of the cab on the way to LAX, after all.
Of course, RIM was sitting on an enviable IP portfolio of its own by this point, and that portfolio was starting to pay dividends right around the time of NTP's original filing. 2002 saw a licensing agreement take hold with Palm (without which the Treo line's famously good keyboards would've had a hard time existing) and a series of claims filed against upstart rival Good Technology -- which at the time was working on a suspiciously BlackBerry-esque device called the G100 to accompany its server-side suite that duplicated much of RIM's functionality. Good would ultimately go on to abandon the G100 to focus strictly on software and services and undergo a couple takeovers -- most recently by well-known patent plaintiff Visto -- so the rough-and-tumble hardware biz clearly hadn't treated them with as much kindness as it had RIM.
The engineers up at RIM headquarters weren't taking a breather, though -- far from it. The early part of the decade was a pretty magical time for wireless, for mobile, and for gadgetry in general; a primordial soup of paradigm-shifting technologies were all rapidly coming to fruition at the same time -- everything from cheap, high-quality color LCDs to lithium-ion polymer batteries and broadly-available data networks -- and phones from all companies were being developed, announced, and released more rapidly than they ever had been before. Gone were the days of owning a DynaTAC for eight years or a StarTAC for four -- useful innovation was simply coming to market too quickly for consumers (or manufacturers) to get comfortable for more than a year or two at a stretch.
To that end, early '03 saw the introduction of BlackBerry Connect on Symbian, bringing BlackBerry's then-legendary corporate email capabilities to a seemingly limitless firehose of Nokia devices (along with a couple Sony Ericssons) and potentially upping RIM's profile in the all-important European theater. It also hit Windows Mobile and Palm OS the same year, cementing BlackBerry's status as a platform, not just a line of devices. The Connect solution would ultimately never gain the same level of popularity as the company's handsets would for hooking up to BlackBerry servers, but from RIM's perspective, that's probably just as well -- they saw it as a win-win opportunity, and Nokia, Microsoft, and Palm very likely did as well.
Just a few months later, the company would introduce the 7200 series, its very first color models -- but they wouldn't look very familiar to a modern-day Bold owner. Instead, the 7200 was nearly a dead ringer for its lower-end 6200 cousin, swapping out the low-resolution monochrome display for a 65,000-color one that clocked in at just 240 x 160 pixels -- brutal by modern standards. The crappy resolution on the new model could be chalked up in part to the fact that the screen was transflective, a sunlight-viewable tech that has been all but abandoned in modern smartphones because they simply don't pony up sufficient eye candy -- these days, you need HVGA or WVGA resolution and killer contrast ratios to earn respect and market share.
BlackBerry was more popular than ever. In a year and a half, the service exploded from 1 million to over 4 million subscribers, but the time had come: RIM could no longer stretch the industrial design of the 6800 any further than it already had, and in late 2005 it finally took the bold (but totally necessary) step of redesigning its time-tested flagship from the ground up. Waterloo rode the resulting lineup -- the 8700 series -- to new heights, deploying on dozens of carriers around the world with a theme that mimicked the 7100 that had been unveiled a year prior. There were notable firsts: in North America, it became both the company's first EDGE-compliant handset and its first with a QVGA display. It was also the first QWERTY BlackBerry with a proper Send / End key arrangement; needless to say, the modern BlackBerry we know today cemented its ancestry right here.
