New Movie Chronicles Rise and Fall of Government’s First Secure Smartphone Devices – By John Breeden II (Nextgov) / May 18, 2023
BlackBerry devices were at one time almost completely ubiquitous in government service.
Over the weekend, a new movie called BlackBerry was released to a limited number of theaters, having first debuted at the Berlin film festival earlier this year. The picture does a nice job of chronicling the rise and fall of Research in Motion—or RIM—and their BlackBerry devices which were at one time almost completely ubiquitous in government service. The film is partially a documentary, but one interspersed with a lot of comedy. It stars Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson and a lot of other mostly Canadian actors, which is appropriate given that RIM was headquartered in the small town of Waterloo, in the Ontario Province of Canada. It’s also loosely based on the Losing The Signal book from 2016, when the fall of BlackBerry was all but assured.
While I don’t think that the BlackBerry movie will get anywhere close to the popularity of other upcoming films like Fast X, it is an enjoyable look at the pre-smartphone era devices that conquered government service long before Androids, iPhones and BYOD programs became the norm. For those who have long been serving in government service, it might also conjure up an appreciation for how completely dominant BlackBerry was in the federal government, and how much the technology influenced how government operates, even today.
I was fortunate enough to be working in the Government Computer News product testing lab when the first few BlackBerry devices started to make their way into government service. I was just a junior lab reviewer at the time, so I didn’t get any of the primo assignments to review those early devices, although I did get to play with them quite a bit in the lab, and could immediately see their potential to transform how government operated.
