In the UK there was a brief period from 2009-2011 where everyone seemed to replace their Nokia with a Blackberry before iPhones became common (BBM was a big thing)
I can remember one Christmas, perhaps 2010, where my Facebook feed was just folks posting their BBM pins. Ah, what a throwback.
In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.
In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though.
Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.
Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.
Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.
Nokia was globally dominant until 2010, when Android started rapidly eating its market share.
Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.
I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.
They were beaten by RIM/BB
They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)