Blackberry made a tremendously successful high featured phone. Then Steve Jobs and Apple released a full-fledged minicomputer that fit in the palm, with a usable interface, that happened to also function as a phone.
The iPhone killed off more than the Blackberry. It killed all off all phones in favor of small computers that happen to function as phones.
They didn't see the world beyond that. There wasn't an even reasonably decent browser in 2009, when I stopped caring. Apple and android changed everything by creating an Internet consumption device.
Blackberry killed blackberry.
The Opera browser was quite nice for BB in 2009. But if you mean native browser, you're absolutely right.
iOS is responsible for more than the raw numbers suggest. iOS begat Android, WP7, and countless lesser imitations. Whether this was through inspiration, as I believe, or outright theft, as Apple maintains, is immaterial.
The fact is that the modern smartphone market was born with the introduction of the iPhone. All else before was prelude.
1. http://www.practicallyefficient.com/home/2010/09/28/the-adja...
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/googles-android-os-early-...
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/10/27/android-handsets-bef...
Apple's "Godphone" keynote was a rude awakening for an industry who had dragged their heels for years, providing a rubbish experience for users and locking all but the largest developers from any access to their devices.
But you fail to see that:
1) red went there from nowhere. In a totally unrelated industry from zero to hero.
2) all other colors, from that point on, started offering stuff just like what red introduced. Before the iPhone's introduction, the top 10 phones looked totally unlike it. So much unlike that people thought it would be a flop, and considered the total lack of physical keyboard "insane" (!). After that introduction, all they started look totally the same.
(Including Android, whose prototypes shown just before the iPhone announcement were crappy, 2006 like regular phones, with physical keyboards and a small screen -- and whose firsr version, introduced a whole year after the iPhone was just like it).
Android didn't have an ability to do that for awhile unless you used apps like Touchdown. IMO, android started hyper growth in 2010-2011.
I ran a 100,000 seat exchange environment from 2008-2012. We had 50 active sync devices in 2008. 3,000 in late '08, 8k in 2010 and around 10-11k today. During that same period, BlackBerry went from 5,000 to less than 500.
It takes that long (and more) for a platform entrenched with enterprise users to lose its dominance. Those are slower to adapt than the end user market (consider enterprises still using IE6).
Plus, the original iPhone didn't have Exchange support and some other stuff RIM users would want to ditch RIM, it got that later.
Here's one smart take on this (from 1.5 and 2.5 years ago, clearly seeing where things were headed):
http://www.asymco.com/2012/04/24/unforgiven-the-consequences...
http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/02/does-the-phone-market-forgi...
From April 2012:
"The rumors swirling around RIM and LG are centered around exits and some suggest Nokia will follow. [...] Earlier last decade the exits were prompted by loss of brand value and subsequent loss of distribution. This decade disruption brought upon by mobile computing brings with it new business models centered on ecosystems and value captured through software and services."