LONDON: As she touched down in the heat and dust of Karachi last week, Benazir Bhutto could be seen smiling and waving — and checking her BlackBerry. Nothing unusual there: Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and David and Victoria Beckham are among the 11 million users more or less addicted to the mobile email gadget.

What started in 1999 as a business tool and a status symbol for executives — and then acquired the nickname ‘the CrackBerry’ as users found their lives unmanageable without one — is about to invade the home. Its creator, Mike Lazaridis, now a billionaire inventor, told this reporter that he plans to turn the BlackBerry into a must-have device for ordinary families.

Undaunted by rivals such as Apple’s iPod, he hopes teenagers will embrace the device and predicts it will become the ‘remote control to your life’.

A free piece of software, BlackBerry Unite!, will provide groups of up to five users with access to shared calendars, pictures, music, documents and other content. The home computer will effectively act as a controlling hub, much like the IT department in an office. In Lazaridis’s optimistic vision, parents will buy BlackBerrys for themselves and their children so they can all co-ordinate their busy lives in a social network.

Lazaridis brushes aside suggestions that he has created a monster of modern living, describing the era of fax machines and telephone messages as ‘the Dark Ages’.

“If we didn’t have BlackBerrys we’d find it more difficult because we’d have to wait till we got home and power up the computer. That’s an achievement. That’s progress.”

Deadly serious about technology and its potential, Lazaridis has donated millions of pounds to research into quantum computing and nanotechnology and his hobbies include quantum physics.—Dawn/The Observer News Service