The first Blackberry device, the 850, was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager. In 2002, the more commonly known Smart phone Blackberry was released, which supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, Internet faxing, Web browsing and other wireless information services. It is an example of a convergence (telecommunications) convergent device. The original Blackberry devices, the RIM 850 and 857, used the Datatec network. Blackberry first made headway in the marketplace by concentrating on e-mail. RIM currently offers Blackberry e-mail service to non-Blackberry devices, such as the Palm Treo, through its Blackberry Connect software. The original Blackberry device had a monochrome display, but all current models have color displays. All models except for the Storm Series had a built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for "thumbing", the use of only the thumbs to type. The Storm 1 and Storm 2 include a Sure Type keypad for typing, and are the two models that are full touch-screen devices with no physical keyboard. Originally, system navigation was achieved with the use of a scroll wheel mounted on the right side of phones prior to the 8700. The track wheel was replaced by the trackball with the introduction of the Pearl series which allowed for 4 way scrolling. The trackball was replaced by the optical track pad with the introduction of the Curve 8500 series. Models manufactured for use with iDEN networks such as Nextel and Mike also incorporate a push-to-talk (PTT) feature, similar to a two-way radio.
