BlackBerry renews itself

A couple of months ago, a video was made official by Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry line of smartphones, teasing the release of its latest smartphone Operating System, BlackBerry 6. Now, in the last couple of years, we've seen BlackBerry moving from OS 4.7 to 5.0, and now from 5.0 to 6. The interesting tidbit here is that the OS did not look different when OS 5 debuted, and clearly, BlackBerry devices were being left behind as iOS, Android and webOS brought innovation to the consumer market. Like Symbian and Windows Mobile, BlackBerry OS belonged to an old era, and OS 5 was supposed to bring RIM's most important product back into the fight. But it didn't. Now the question is, what is BlackBerry 6? Is it just another makeover with a new number to make it feel new? Or did RIM really put in an effort to make its mobile Operating System worth our time? Let's find out.

RIM and the Storms

In January 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the mythical iPhone to the world, showing all handset makers how a smartphone should be built, both in hardware and in software. Research In Motion, a Canadian handset manufacturer based in Waterloo, famous for the most successful smartphone brand for corporate users (BlackBerry), paid close attention to Apple's entrance into the smartphone industry, and thought that, if Apple could build such a revolutionary device in its first attempt, surely they could do something better, as they too, focused on high-quality products and had an established set of exclusive customers.

Thus, they set a target release date of 2008 for the new device, and started working on a new consumer-focused, revolutionary touch-screen smartphone.