After the launch of the BlackBerry Smartphone in early 1999, sales have now reached more than 50 million which is a great success from Research In Motion (RIM).

Research In Motion's initial growth came from making two-way pagers, electronic-mail and web browsing support to its products as the BlackBerry name became synonymous with the business smartphone market. From then on, Research In Motion estimates that it has accumulated subscribers of 21 million who transfer an estimated three petabytes of data over handsets each month.

BlackBerry Bold and BlackBerry Storm are Research In Motion's latest models, which the company hopes will be the path to the next 50 million sales. However, there's a lot of competition.

In addition to Windows Mobile and Symbian handsets, which led BlackBerry to find itself in a smartphone arena devastated by the economic crisis, new and formidable rivals have emerged in the form of the Apple iPhone and the Google Android platform, with challengers such as the Palm Pre looming on the horizon.