The BlackBerry was nearly called something about email. Research In Motion, of Waterloo, Ontario, had a two-way pager and a handful of working names. Quartz reports PocketLink and MegaMail. A New Yorker piece reposted by Lexicon lists EasyMail, MegaMail and ProMail. In 1998 the company took the problem to Lexicon Branding in California.
Lexicon's president, David Placek, thought the name should calm people down. Email, he argued, was stressful. "Blood pressure goes up," he told The New Yorker. A fruit seemed friendlier.
The keyboard supplied the fruit. Its small oval keys reminded the team of the drupelets on a blackberry. Quartz describes the buttons as vaguely resembling the skin of a fruit. The first word on the board was "strawberry." A colleague objected: "Strawberry is too slow." Placek explained why that mattered: "This technology is instantaneous."
Black won for its look. The New Yorker says the colour suggested high-tech devices. Lexicon also capitalized both letter Bs. A linguistic study suggested that "b" sounds reliable across languages, so the second B stayed big.
RIM's engineers did not love being named after a fruit. Quartz says the shortlist ran to about 40 names before executives in Waterloo settled on BlackBerry. The device launched in 1999 and became a consumer hit.
The product grew bigger than its maker. On January 30, 2013, Research In Motion renamed itself BlackBerry. Chief executive Thorsten Heins said: "From today on, we are BlackBerry everywhere in the world."
The fruit's name is much older. Etymonline dates blackberry to the early 12th century, from Old English blaceberian. It was "so called for the color." Etymonline also notes that berry and apple are the only native English fruit names. It adds a brief entry for the handheld device, introduced in 1999 and decommissioned in 2022.
Lexicon has named many other products. The same New Yorker piece credits it with Swiffer, PowerBook and Pentium.