Toast - BlackBerry Smartphones
Sliced Bread
BBC
4.6 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How did the company behind the revolutionary BlackBerry smartphone lose its grip on the handset market?
The BBC Business journalist, Sean Farrington, investigates with special guest, Sir Stephen Fry, who has remained 'faithful' to the BlackBerry brand.
Alongside them is the entrepreneur, Sam White, who at the end of the show has to reach her own conclusions on why BlackBerry handsets disappeared, based only on what she has just heard and her own business acumen.
The first BlackBerry device freed business executives from their desks, allowing them to easily write, send and receive emails from almost anywhere. But that was not the only thing that made the BlackBerry, and its later iterations, extraordinary.
The actor, comedian, author and broadcaster, Sir Stephen Fry, also used to be a tech blogger and wrote in glowing terms about BlackBerry devices...until they took a turn for the worse.
Stephen explains why he was disappointed by a brand he loves and how he still hopes it might make a return.
Jim Balsillie was a co-chief executive officer at Research in Motion, the company that created BlackBerry, and offers his insight into how it quickly became a $20billion business and why he felt compelled to resign from such a tremendously successful venture.
The entrepreneur and tech blogger, Kevin Michaluk, witnessed how BlackBerry handsets soared and then sank. He's made a successful career out of building "spiritual successors" to them but can his attempts to bring them back under the original brand prove successful?
The podcast version of this episode, available on BBC Sounds, includes a bonus interview at the end with Sir Stephen Fry on how he feels about technology and social media today.
Produced by Jon Douglas / BBC Audio North
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. You're about to listen |
| 0:39.5 | to the latest series of Toast. Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But if |
| 0:45.5 | you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode seven days earlier than anywhere else, |
| 0:50.3 | first on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to another new series of Toast, |
| 0:57.9 | the BBC Radio 4 series that looks at amazing businesses |
| 1:01.1 | that soared and stumbled and ended up toast. |
| 1:05.4 | I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist, |
| 1:07.9 | and with me is the entrepreneur, Sam White. |
| 1:10.1 | Of course, Sam doesn't know what we're about to discuss. |
| 1:13.0 | Her reactions are immediate, they're authentic at the end. She's going to give us her verdict on why this business idea failed, based on what she's heard and her own business acumen. |
| 1:23.6 | Of course, this time we're going to head back to the early 2000s when all of a sudden |
| 1:28.5 | you could send an email from almost anywhere. You didn't have to be at your desk anymore. |
| 1:36.0 | Sam, hello. Hey, how are you? Good to see you. Always nice to be back for a new series. I know. It |
| 1:41.3 | feels like absolutely ages. I'm sure it's not, but it feels like a while. |
... |
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