Once its handsets prompted such devotion and adulation in its users them to christened it Crackberry.
But in the increasingly competitive marketplace, RIM provides found itself muscled out through Samsung and Apple, among other folks.
Its rugged build, keyboard and secure servers made it ideal for business use - and for just a younger generation its BlackBerry Messenger Service remains an important way of keeping in feel.
But problems with handsets, coupled with a service outage in 2011 which saw many users locked outside of their emails, tarnished the brand name.
RIM sold less than 12 million handsets within the last few quarter, compared with 47. 8 thousand iPhones and 63 million Samsung products.
Gareth Beavis, phones editor at TechRadar, believes the BlackBerry 10 can see RIM return as a important player, but argues the company took its eye over ball.
"In the last seven decades we've seen the smartphone rise from something that people thought was only for businessmen to something that anyone owns, " he said.
"In which race, people didn't really understand what was going to happen. As much as other things, Nokia were in the similar situation.
"RIM really wanted to think that its keyboard and email combination was enough for several users.
"It turns out that which might be ported into a touchscreen, right into a larger device, it can add media and items that people wanted to do away from home in their pleasure time up to in business.
"What RIM never really did was capture those on the street who just wanted a smartphone to perform everything.
"It captured the children's market, it got the organization market, but eventually there were alternatives to that on Apple and from Samsung... and yes it really kind of fell absent. "
Those who have seen the new BlackBerry are, however, singing the praises. Ramon Llamas, an expert at IDC, said it was a "really positive step for your company".
He added: "It puts BlackBerry on a single level as Apple, Android in addition to Windows Phone, and brings them into 2013 as opposed to being stuck back in 2010. inch
As much as anything, the BlackBerry 10 launch is approximately reputation management.
Carole Blake, a London-based literary agent, was the moment a BlackBerry devotee. But following the service outage in 2011, she thought i would sever her relationship with your ex handset - by smashing it having a hammer.
She was at the Frankfurt Book Fair - the "lifeblood of (her) agency" any time her BlackBerry stopped working.
"The outages took for three days - sometimes it absolutely was live, sometimes it wasn't, inch she explained.
"Once you can't trust something - a person or an object, or particularly a sheet of technology - then you do not know whether it's working or not. You don't know whether you have got up-to-date emails or not. It had been so infuriating.
"And then naturally (there were) all the difficulty with the handset. The battery would drain in the moment, even though it ended up full two moments ago. It would freeze when you were in the heart of an email or a text or possibly a phone call.
"So it merely became too unreliable for organization. "
Already much is known about the BlackBerry 10 OS.
The first handset is likely to be entirely touchscreen, rather versus more traditional keyboard and display screen.
Its message hub, where consumers can access emails, SMS, Facebook messages and Twitter Direct Messages all available as one place, rather than opening individual apps, will please the social websites generation.
Security remains key, plus the BlackBerry 10 will allow the right and a work mode - where security settings is usually completely customised by an supervisor, whilst allowing the user freedom to perform what they want without any affect confidential material stored on the task side.
However, smartphone users want an abundance of apps for their device - and, for now at very least, it will lag significantly driving its main competitors.
The market seems confident the BlackBerry 10 will impact, with the company's share price tag doubling since mid-September - the halting of a months-long decline.
But it hovers throughout the $17 (£11) mark, well under a June 2008 high where RIM traded above $140 (£89).