We live in an age of celebrity, where countless websites and magazines feed on a never-ending stream of red-carpet and paparazzi pictures. We gossip about film, TV and pop stars, fashion models and so on: what they are wearing, where they’re going, how much they’re eating, who they’re sleeping with. But there’s one odd group of celebrity spotters who are not focusing on either the cellulite or the sex. When they see Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj or Pippa Middleton, they want to know which phone she’s carrying. Or, more likely, which type of BlackBerry, because they’re ubiquious, and they can’t all be free.
Celebrity BlackBerry Sightings is the main place to go for this type of thing, and its owners at RIMarkable say it gets “a ridiculous amount of traffic”. Crackberry.com has a weekly roundup of Crackberry Sightings, which gets repeated on The Wall Street Journal’s website, while BlackBerryOS has a similar section. And it’s not just an American thing. Interested in Filipino celebrity BlackBerry sightings? There’s a site for that. India? Indeed.
Even mainstream publications get involved. A decade ago, The New York Times outed Al Gore, Michael Dell and Microsoft’s Bill Gates as BlackBerry users, saying: “BlackBerry is the choice of a high-tech and financial elite.” This turned out not to be true in Gates’s case. More recently, US president Barack Obama made news by dropping his BlackBerry after getting off Airforce One. “Mr Obama was making his way across the taxiway at the Air National Guard base in Tennessee when he suffered every networker’s nightmare — watching his BlackBerry smartphone fly out of his grasp and clutter onto the ground,” reported the Daily Mail, along with five photos to show POTUS picking it up himself.
So far, phone spotting has been more or less limited to BlackBerry users, mainly because RIM’s phones really are used by celebs, and possibly because they often have them in their hands, rather than stuck in a purse or pocket. One exception was the Sidekick — the first really good messaging phone — which shot to fame when Paris Hilton’s was hacked in 2005. This was exciting because her Sidekick included lots of photos, some of them featuring Paris in a bikini or topless. It also included the phone numbers of famous friends such as Christina Aguilera, Eminem, Lindsay Lohan, Anna Kournikova and Avril Lavigne.
You could, of course, blame the famous heiress for not using a more secure BlackBerry, but her BlackBerry email account had been hacked a month earlier. As some joker said at the time: “It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy.”
The BlackBerry is, of course, the mobile of choice for the US government and most large corporations, partly because of its built-in encryption. Quite why movie stars, Playboy bunnies and north London schoolgirls also use BlackBerrys is harder to fathom. Maybe they like the efficient email, keyboards, and multi-tasking. Mostly, I suspect, they love BBM or BlackBerry Messenger. If all your friends have BBM, you’ve got to have it too.
Celebrity BlackBerry users such as Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Rihanna, Madonna, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry and Russell Brand, Will.i.am, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake and the rest must have driven a lot of sales.
But can RIM can hang on to the celebrity market? In its latest iPhone update, Apple has copied numerous features from Android and Windows Phone, and iMessenger “screams BlackBerry Messenger (BBM)”, according to Fox Business.
There are signs of slippage. BlackBerry user Victoria Beckham was spotted with a £22,000 solid gold iPhone 4 — again, see Mail Online for the breathless story and pics. Miley Cyrus, another long-time BlackBerry user, has also been seen with an iPhone, and Jennifer Love Hewitt may already have defected. Even Justin Bieber has been spotted with a BlackBerry in one hand and an iPhone in the other. Where will it end?
As far as I can see, the iPhone is the mobile of choice for secretaries and students, Starbucks-drinkers, general media types, and people who own Apple computers. Many of them see it as a status symbol. This is a rather different profile from celebrity BlackBerry users, whose aspirations run more towards private planes, yachts, ranches and mansions. I suspect they don’t much care which phone they use, though one thing in the BlackBerry’s favour is that it’s actually not bad at making calls.
Jack Schofield is a long-time Nokia user, and doesn’t give a damn.
