Energizer Is Selling This Charger for a BlackBerry That Doesn’t Exist

David Shapiro — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:41:24 -0400

Yesterday I was dropping off some film at the Walgreen's on Astor Place when I saw the Energizer Energi To Go, a portable cell phone charger, which has a photo on the packaging of a BlackBerry that doesn't exist:
That thing that looks like a BlackBerry on the cover is actually a BlackBerry 8700 with a trackball. But every BlackBerry 8700 (8700c, 8700g, 8700r) has a scroll wheel on the side, not a trackball in the middle, which relegates this representation to the world of fantasy, right next to the BlackBerrys with front-facing cameras.

Plenty of other BlackBerrys have trackballs, but not the 8700, which you can see here. This is like if you walked into a store that was selling aftermarket iPad covers, but the iPads on the packaging had clickwheels to avoid getting cease-and-desisted by Apple.

Here's an illustration of exactly what's wrong:

So why is Energizer using this fake/Photoshopped BlackBerry to sell its generic smartphone chargers? It could be because RIM doesn't want Energizer selling aftermarket chargers and wouldn't grant the company the license to use a photo of a real BlackBerry, or perhaps Energizer didn't want to pay for the right to use a photo of a real BlackBerry, or maybe Energizer didn't want consumers to think this would only work on actual BlackBerrys.

Anyway, no matter the reason, Energizer has created a FrankenBerry that any BlackBerry connoisseur would love to own. They've also made themselves look pretty bush league for a $4.7 billion corporation with this shit.

David Shapiro is Betabeat’s gadgets correspondent and the pseudonymous blogger behind Pitchfork Reviews Reviews.

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Energizer Is Selling This Charger for a BlackBerry That Doesn’t Exist