To understand why Munich was chosen, you have to understand Europe’s head start. In the late 1990s, Europe was light-years ahead of North America in wireless technology. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) was the standard, while the US was still a patchwork of clunky CDMA and iDEN networks.
They didn't know it yet, but they had just downloaded the first virus of the 21st century: the addiction to always being on .
If you had been sipping a weissbier in the English Garden on a crisp autumn day 25 years ago, you might have witnessed a peculiar sight: sharply dressed businesspeople staring intently at a tiny green screen, their thumbs moving faster than a Bavarian accordion player’s fingers. blackberry 850 introduction location munich germany
Imagine that. Today, we expect the universe in our pocket. Back then, the magic trick was that you could reply to an email without a laptop.
RIM knew their device—running on the Mobitex network—needed a sophisticated, dense, tech-hungry audience to beta test the "push email" concept. They chose Munich, the Stadt der Geister (City of Minds), home to Siemens, BMW, and a dense corridor of tech startups. The launch event was famously understated. Unlike the Steve Jobs-style theatrical reveals of later years, the BlackBerry 850’s debut was held in a rented conference room near the Munich Residenz. To understand why Munich was chosen, you have
The press release, dated August 30, 1999, is a charming fossil of the era. It touted the device as a "wireless handheld that offers easy access to corporate data." The killer feature? Two-way paging.
While the world credits Waterloo, Ontario, as the home of BlackBerry, the genesis of the always-on, thumb-typing revolution didn’t happen in Canada. It happened in the heart of Bavaria, with the introduction of the . The "Interim" Device That Changed Everything By 1999, Research In Motion (RIM) had already dabbled in pagers. But the 850 was different. It wasn't a phone. It wasn't really an email machine yet. It was a wireless handheld device that looked like a bar of soap that had swallowed a tiny QWERTY keyboard. They didn't know it yet, but they had
Here was a device designed for efficiency and getting things done . Yet, it was launched in a city famous for two things: Gemütlichkeit (the deliberate state of relaxation) and Oktoberfest .
