BlackBerry director Matt Johnson on why the iPhone won and why most tech movies suck


A stylized photo of an early BlackBerry prototype
The BlackBerry started as a messy prototype — and eventually kind of took over the world. | Illustration by William Joel / The Verge; Image: IFC Films

You probably already know the story of BlackBerry. Its demise was as spectacular and public as anything you can think of, from a top-of-the-world gadget that people referred to as an addiction — the CrackBerry phenomenon was no joke — to just another of the many things left for dead by the iPhone. Talking about the BlackBerry now is like talking about, I don’t know, the Walkman or the Flip camera. They lived, they died, the end.

And yet, I was totally riveted by BlackBerry, the new movie directed by Matt Johnson about the rise and fall of Research In Motion (RIM) and the epic product it created. The movie is stylistically somewhere in the middle of The Social Network, General Magic, and Silicon Valley, following a ragtag bunch of...

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