BlackBerry handsets stopped shipping new software in 2022. The brand has been licensed, dropped, and licensed again. The devices that defined business mobile for a decade are now nostalgia merchandise. There's a lot to remember.
What the BlackBerry did first
- 01 Push email. Notifications that mattered, when they mattered. Every modern phone copied this.
- 02 A keyboard you could touch-type on without looking — the QWERTY thumb-board is still missed by a vocal minority.
- 03 Enterprise-grade encryption at the carrier level. BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was the WhatsApp of its day, but secure.
- 04 Battery life of a working week. The 8700 series lasted four days under heavy use.
- 05 A trackball, then a trackpad. The first time a smartphone interface didn't require touching the screen.
What it meant culturally
- 01 Heads of state used them. Obama famously refused to give his up when he became President.
- 02 Wall Street ran on them. The traders' floor was a sea of red blinking lights.
- 03 London during the 2011 riots ran on BBM — because nobody had built a free, encrypted, fast group chat for the iPhone yet.
- 04 'CrackBerry' was a real word. Compulsive checking was an actual social phenomenon.
Why it died
- 01 The iPhone happened in 2007. BlackBerry's response — the Storm — was a touchscreen that physically clicked, an attempt to honour the keyboard while having a touchscreen. It was, charitably, a disaster.
- 02 BlackBerry 10 in 2013 was actually a good OS. It was four years too late.
- 03 Enterprise IT departments stopped mandating BlackBerry and started accepting iPhones. The whole moat collapsed in 24 months.
- 04 Developers chose the iPhone. The app ecosystem story ended the conversation.
"BlackBerry got eaten by the iPhone, and then it spent ten years getting smaller. But there's barely a smartphone in 2025 that doesn't carry some genetic material from a 2005 BlackBerry. The empire's dead. The DNA is everywhere."
What lasted
- 01 Push notifications. Every iOS and Android phone copies what BlackBerry pioneered.
- 02 End-to-end encrypted messaging — Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp owe a debt to BBM.
- 03 Enterprise mobile device management — a category BlackBerry created and refined before MDM was an acronym.
- 04 The cultural notion that your phone is a piece of work infrastructure. Mixed blessing.
What we'd take back
- 01 Physical keyboards. The PinePhone has tried. So has Unihertz. There is still a niche audience that would buy one tomorrow.
- 02 Battery life as a serious design constraint, not a marketing line.
- 03 An OS that respected your attention. Notification handling on BlackBerry was, weirdly, better than what most phones ship now.
- 04 Buttons. We miss buttons.