BlackBerry is a common noun, meaning either a
small berry in the
rubus genus, or more commonly today, any
mobile phone that has support for
real-time or
semi-real-time push email.
The first company to coin the term
BlackBerry was
Canadian-based
Research In Motion, but by no means are they the only company to produce BlackBerries which has through aggressive use as a noun by both RIM and its partners (noticeably
Verizon Wireless who uses the tag
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry and uses the term as a noun in its advertisements).
Other companies that currently make BlackBerries include
Nokia,
HTC,
Sony-Ericsson,
Motorola and a host of other mobile phone companies. It's argued that to be classified as a BlackBerry, you also need to have a slow, unstable, and basic web browser, but this appears to no longer be the case as even the
Research in Motion mobile devices have announced that they will be switching to a
webkit-based browser making it the last popular maker of BlackBerries to do so.