The journalists in attendance were skeptical. Why would you need a device that was too big to be a pager and too small to be a Palm Pilot? The one thing they didn't mock was the keyboard. Those tiny, chiclet-style keys felt surprisingly tactile—a tactile illusion that would eventually lead to the medical diagnosis of "BlackBerry Thumb." Munich didn't just host the launch; it became the petri dish for the "CrackBerry" addiction.

Here was a device designed for efficiency and getting things done . Yet, it was launched in a city famous for two things: Gemütlichkeit (the deliberate state of relaxation) and Oktoberfest .

RIM knew their device—running on the Mobitex network—needed a sophisticated, dense, tech-hungry audience to beta test the "push email" concept. They chose Munich, the Stadt der Geister (City of Minds), home to Siemens, BMW, and a dense corridor of tech startups. The launch event was famously understated. Unlike the Steve Jobs-style theatrical reveals of later years, the BlackBerry 850’s debut was held in a rented conference room near the Munich Residenz.

They didn't know it yet, but they had just downloaded the first virus of the 21st century: the addiction to always being on .

And yet, Munich embraced it. The city’s industrial engineering mindset saw the 850 not as a leash, but as a tool. It was a little German-engineered piece of radio technology (designed in Canada, but optimized for the Munich-based Infineon chips inside). The BlackBerry 850 was discontinued within two years, replaced by the iconic 957 and later the 6210 (the first with a phone). But the 850 is the fossil that proves the origin story.