With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black

To type the letter in upper case, hold down the Shift key and move your finger over to the letter. Same thing with numbers and punctuation but hold down the Numbers key.

I've gone back and forth with smartphones but I never really enjoyed them. It's not a requirement for work so it just turns into an unproductive timesink.

I was using it as my daily phone a couple years ago and the only things i missed was a flashlight and maps. I'm thinking about going back.

The physical keyboard was really nice but the rest of the phones just weren’t. If they’d shipped a WebKit browser earlier it might have helped but they really hit a hubris-assisted low point floundering for years right when Apple and even Google started executing very well.

The best case might have been a Microsoft acquisition and doubling down on enterprise integration and features like the really nice one they added for locking down your work account from your personal data on the phone.

RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved speed.

When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop websites and online video.

Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common).

Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.

While the keyboard was a sales win (or at least an attempted one) for the end users, their key USP for many corporates was more secure comms than other devices offered.

Then there were discussions about some government agencies wanting access, and talk of some being given access in some jurisdictions in some circumstances. I'm not sure how true that talk was, but it got some peoples hackles up significantly as it implied back doors existed in the system.

Then there was the infamous CEO interview walkout when a (related?) question about security was raised, which really left a bad image and killed a lot of hope the company may have had regarding getting the security reputation back. Losing that USP was, while far from the only factor, rather significant in BBs precipitous drop in popularity.

Once other phones started handling email just as well and became as reliable, Blackberry didn't have a reason to exist other than for those that wanted a basic email phone with a keyboard.

The Blackberry phones I remember in the pre-2010 era were not as good for media as other phones. Of course the whole landscape changed once iPhone gained traction and Android entered the scene, I'm sure the newer Blackberrys were a bit better but by that time everyone seemed to be getting Android or iPhones.

I recall Blackberry needing special phone plans as well, not sure if that still exists anymore.

I actually feel that a lot of "enterprise support" on iPhone was a side-effect of having a lot of users trying to use their personal iPhone instead of their corporate BlackBerry for work.

The Keyboard thing ended-up being true for, I estimate, less then 10% of users?

But apple's soft keyboard is VERY good. Android's ... tolerable.

It became a lie.

> I really wish someone would do a phone UI that is a lot more text focused.

It has to be consistent, otherwise there's little point. BB10 had one-button keyboard shortcuts everywhere—it was baked into the OS, and it worked really well.

Part of the reason it worked well is that there were standards. Backspace was always "delete", C was always "create" or "compose", I/O was zoom in/out, T/B was scroll to top/bottom—you get the picture. Keyboard shortcuts typically corresponded with menu items, and the shortcut would be shown in the menu. It's not like desktop multi-key shortcuts that are super hard to remember. Mostly because BB10 shortcuts were contextual.

On the home screen, long-pressing a key would also open an app, which you could customise at will.

I still miss my Bold 9000 and Bold 9700, which had by far the best ever keyboards. I remember typing entire college assignment papers on those while on the bus or train. Their Docs app exported to .docx, so I'd email a copy to myself and open it on my desktop to pick up where I left off.