The JVM based devices came years later. This was around 1998, with the 386 based blackbery pager that could only do emails over Mobitex, no phone calls. It even looked like a pager. At the time, phones were not so dominant, data switched over mobile only existed on paper, and two-way paging looked like it had a future. So we totally killed the crude 2-way paging networks that were out there. And RIM successfully later made the transition to phone networks. Wasn't till iPhone and android that RIM ran into trouble.