Many people are not aware that the very first cell phone was made by Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973. Cell phones were made available to the general public in the year 1984. It was quite a marvel because you could carry your phone with you anywhere that you went. But these instruments were highly impractical because they were bulky and very expensive.
At that time, no one could fathom what advances would be made to that cell phone. These days you can find phones that are smaller than your hand. Once that can perform functions you would only have dreamed of twenty years ago.
The BlackBerry is one such device that seems like a fairly recent name. But it has actually been around for quite a long time. The first model was developed in 1998 by a Canadian company called Research In Motion (RIM). This model – the 850, was a little more than a pager though it did integrate with email. At the time however, cells phones were not very popular in the consumer market. Internet connections were still mostly dial-up, hence consumers had no requirement for a mobile email device. This model worked on two AA batteries.
The next line of BlackBerry devices was launched in 2002. These seemed much more to the characteristics we see today. The look has changed since the locator style to a PDA (personal data assistant) with a QWERTY keyboard. This model had a lithium battery expiration.
As with most technology, the next few years saw more upgrades to the BlackBerry devices. The services that the device provided were push email, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and a few more wireless information services.
The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is a software package that integrates a BlackBerry handheld to an organization’s email system. While individual users can use a wireless service provider, when an organization has multiple users they would have to run BES on their own network. Every BlackBerry device has a unique ID called a BlackBerry PIN, which identifies the device to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Using the feature called Trilateration, the newer model of BlackBerry can track your location without using GPS, thus preserving battery life. The accuracy of this is however less than that of GPS owing to a number of factors which include distance, large buildings, mountains, etc.
