Jim Balsillie reveals that the release of Apple's iPhone was devastating for the company
BlackBerry 's co-founder has admitted that the release of Apple's iPhone and his company's rushed attempts to match it were devastating for the mobile phone firm.
Jim Balsillie, who was also co-chief executive of Research in Motion before it changed its name to BlackBerry, said in his first public remarks since leaving the company in 2012 that he knew his company couldn't compete with the iPhone after it was released in 2007.
He added that the Storm, BlackBerry's buggy touchscreen device that was meant to rival Apple's iconic device, had a "100pc return rate".
Mr Balsillie said the impact of rushing the Storm out was devastating, and Verizon, their largest customer, fired them over it.
"With Storm we tried to do too much. It was a touch display, it was a clickable display, it had new applications, and it was all done in an incredibly short period of time and it blew up on us," he said. "That was the time I knew we couldn't compete on high end hardware."
Pioneered in 1999, the original BlackBerry phone changed telecommunications by allowing on-the-go business people to access email wirelessly.
The BlackBerry Storm
However, it has since struggled in the face of competition from Apple and Google.

Analysts have predicted that the number of people in the UK using BlackBerry's operating system will decline dramatically this year , dipping below 1m users for the first time in many years.
eMarketer's latest forecast of mobile phone usage indicates that BlackBerry now has as few as 700,000 users in the UK, with this number expected to fall to 400,000 by 2017.
In the past two years alone, BlackBerry's UK market share has fallen from 8pc to less than 2pc.
The company unveiled its BlackBerry Classic handset in December, following on from the square Passport last year, which impressed investors if not consumers.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackberry-co-founder-iphone-rival-222747352.html