People Keeping BlackBerry Alive | Hacker News Reader

People Keeping BlackBerry Alive

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150 pointssharkweek137 comments

I'm one of those guys, I still use a Q10 (OS10 family) as my daily driver. I felt in love with its ux e.g. the hub which acts both as notification center and timeline, full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!) and an app permission system which allowed you choose which one should be granted to the app (again, back in 2013! Android had to wait years before this was implemented)

Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app, and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but what it does it does well.

Also, the privacy is unmatched

Which is your Twitter app? Now that m.twitter.com no longer works in the BB10 browser, I need one.

Bird10! It's open source (https://github.com/SimoDax/Bird10) and you can find it here https://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-10-apps-f274/bird10...

The unified message centre has not yet been topped.

Hello fellow q10 fan! Small question: if someone were to start a company to maintain q10 and q20 devices, how valuable would that be to you at a monthly subscription rate?

I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.

Not the original poster, but I have a hard time imagining you'd be able to meaningfully maintain the OS and integrated software (e.g. Hub, supported TLS versions for mail, etc.) via "mods" of any kind.

What _might_ be useful and actually possible would be an up-to-date maintained "rebuild" / "rewrite" of the native browser app, since there you can vendor pretty much all the important components you need.

I can safely say that you can't make money out of this platform anymore, the user base is just too small. If I had to live with the donations coming from my apps for BB10 well, let's say I would have already starved to death ;)

> full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!)

Only two years behind the N9.

> Only two years behind the N9.

Symbian still alive![0,1,2] (Not sure about Maemoo/MeeGo)

[0] https://github.com/mrRosset/Symbian-Archive/issues/10

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/symbian/new

[2] https://github.com/search/?o=desc&q=symbian&s=updated&type=R...

Which also had the unified notification/message centre too.

The N9 was so far ahead of its time it’s not even funny. Easily my favourite phone of all time.

> unified notification/message centre too.

All of which also post-date first Ericsson phones, which UI later was later copied by Nokia, Siemens, and everybody else.

I do remember my R520 from 2001 had something similar.

The N9 was only two years behind the Palm Pre!

Man WebOS was ahead of its time. Palm just couldnt put out a piece of hardware that wasnt riddled with defects.

I guess it lives on in LG TVs but for the year or so before that palm pre broke it was great.

I've still got a Z22 that I charge once in a while, and it blows me away with how responsive and useful it is.

I'd probably still use it if calendar and notes sync were working. I should investigate...

So far ahead it’s actually still a better UX than even today’s iOS, just phenomenally well done.

As a sibling post says - I also still believe its UX and likely current responsiveness is better than anything out there now.

I would probably still use webOS if there was still minimal open source development, some phone to put it on (or I guess I’d be fine getting a Pre 3) and the App Store not being shut down with all apps gone. The homebrew apps weren’t really meant to replace the App Store if I recall.

A world where webOS has 5-10% market share as a stable 3rd place would be amazing.

A I miss my N9, in fact I would still be using it if the battery hadn't failed suddenly. The story behind axing the N9 still makes me shake my head, how could that have been something else than MS planting a trojan horse at the top of Nokia to take over their mobile business. The incompetence or malice displayed by Elop still makes me shake my head to this day.

I held on to my Q10 for a long time. That feeling of being able to type text with one hand because of the physical keyboard was so awesome. Alas, I finally had to drop it when an application I basically couldn't live without stopped supporting BB platform and I needed the latest version of that App.

You can install apks on Q10s manually. I did that when WhatsApp was discontinued for BB 5 years back.

> Also, the privacy is unmatched

Unless nation states or mercs are in your threat model, that is.

You're still gonna be Mossad'ed upon.

Need magic amulets and submarines in that situation.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Gosh, how badly I miss my Q10.

Had to switch to major OS because of banking and few other apps.

Every single device since then sucked, including BB Android based crap.

The last time I've something like that was when I switched to 9900

I use a BB Classic (q20) every day. It's the most responsive, ergonomic phone on the market aside from the q10. I also have the native development kit and the skills to keep that device operating forever, one thing I noticed is the root SSL certificates are no longer updated. I have copied the ones off my Arch system to the SD card and manually install new roots of trust as they are published.

When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.

Can you share this script please? Thank you so much

That'd be very helpful. I want to keep the Q10 running as long as I can.

In the 10-12 years since I last had a Blackberry, no phone that I've had has come close to it in terms of an email device.

Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over WiFi/HD Calls etc).

AFAICT from the Internets, BB10 OS actually supports VoLTE, but there's no way to manually enable it. Given the support status of the devices no carrier will provision VoLTE on it for you these days either, so we're out of luck.

That brings me back. I worked on it way back when. The IMS stack works over WiFi too; it could probably work with any generic SIP provider and hook into the native phone app.

I wonder if it's something in the baseband, if you can get QXDM to talk to the modem, you could probably enable it.

You just need to enable a diag modem on bb10, if you can, then voila.

https://mt-tech.fi/en/modify-sony-xz-xzs-xz-premium-xz1-and-...

Something like this.

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-qxdm-port-activatio...

I think the iPhone got a lot of customers who were on the fence about blackberries. I wanted better email, but the stereotype of the PHB blackberry owner was just fading into obsolescence when the iPhone 3G showed up and killed half of everything.

BlackBerry had wifi calling since 2007.

Not the only one, either. I actually had the Nokia 6086 (https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6086-1798.php) which had UMA. I got it through T-Mobile and got my first wifi router ever, the WRT-54GTM ("TM" for T-Mobile), through their HotSpot@Home service. There was a small monthly fee in exchange for unlimited wifi calling.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/t-mobile-intros-long...

I’m fairly sure that Blackberry devices were the first to do Wi-Fi calling in the US on T-Mobile.

To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry".

It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall).

And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.

(edit - to be clear, 'from what I recall' of reading the book. I was never there!)

Let’s say it’s January 9th, 2007 and Steve Jobs has just come off stage after the original iPhone announcement. You’re in charge of BlackBerry. What do you do differently?

Go meet customers, your friends, guys in a bar, kids, your parents with a bag full of iPhones the minute you can. Whatever you do, bypass IT teams that love Blackberry and have invested their time in it and like it. Talk to consumers. IT teams and the profits from having people tied to BES etc will blind you.

Make everyone watch a 20 minute video clip on both phones and ask them which was easier to use. Get them to type out XYZ thing that they hear. Give them the phones for a week and bring them back and ask them to type something else out. See how fast they can type on a screen vs keyboard. Think about what will be more useful a big screen or slightly faster typing.

Then go make a iPhone version and Mac/Windows version of Blackberry Messenger. Give it away for free on all platforms. When that's done. Expand BES to control MDM laptops.

Go find a small company that does music well, ideally one in Stockholm. Integrate their product into your phone and cross platform desktop offering. Use the cheap data deals you have for BES for music, it'll be expensive but will capture a young audience and will differentiate quickly from the iPod to iPhone leap many will make. Data plans are still expensive so driving down the cost will be helpful.

Open source the phone code early but keep the services under your control. Find whoever is running the BlackBerry Store and fire them. Then anyone else who was involved with that. Invent a Men-In-Black memory eraser and use it wisely on anyone involved with that. Find out what the cost of the iPhone app store is, undercut it and switch the model so that the first X percent of initial sales go to the developer.

Hire a couple of smart people and build a free online training course and certification to help people build apps. Treat them nicely. Give them free stuff and whatever tooling they need to build stuff. Translate it into many languages. Pick up the phone and get people from all walks of life, including dire poverty in places in Asia and Africa. Ask them what they would look for to make their life easier (hmm payments you say, hmmmm cheaper phones you say, hmmmm use BES as a sort of Free Basics). Build a decent Chinese Keyboard.

Build search into your phone.

Don't join PRISM, don't do some shady stuff in the Middle East and India about encryption.

Build you the stuff that BES can do well. Messaging turning into productivity. Expand cloud hosting. Turn messaging into something more fun and social. Use encryption as a competitive advantage in the long run. Strike a few deals with phone companies for VOIP.

Go tell the world you aren't worried about it and your main concern is Microsoft (they'll balls up mobile eventually anyway) and oh report Steve Jobs for engaging in anticompetitive contact crap for developers.

Canada, too, I believe, regarding the encryption.

Double-down on what people love most about your platform: BBM and make it cross-platform. Charge $0.99 after 1 year.

Apple will be too inward to be competition for that.

So basically pivot into what became whatsapp[0]?

My recollection of Blackberry from that time was the "killer app" was email on the go -- hence the term Crackberry and the publicity from Obama [1]

I didn't personally hear about BBM until the 2011 London riots [2]

I guess blackberry was aimed at two distinct types of customers -- teenagers using BBM, and white collars wanting to read their email on holiday

[0] https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/42072...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f...

BBM's userbase was basically worthless.

As soon as Facebook added chat there was a preloaded alternative on every phone. And Facebook was the first app people would install on every phone.

All the real pro users of BBM still kept all important messaging on the real pro platform: Bloomberg Chat.

I said this from the very beginning. Switch to android but skin it and lock it down as tight as possible. Port over BB messenger. Make a killer top of the line android phone with the signature BB physical keyboard.

Why did Android win? Why couldn’t webOS be fast tracked if it had begun development and use that instead? With a solid foundation of a user base, future prospects seem pretty good to be in control of your OS.

I’m assuming in this case, the acquisition of Palm as well. BlackBerry’s market cap was pretty up there at the time, I believe. A mostly stock merger without too much dilution of Blackberry could happen.

I would have bought QNX as they did, but got it out to the hobbyist and on more platforms while picking one API and not the confusing mess they had. Android was not assured in 2007 and Google is not your friend.

Placate Verizon with something, but keep going on the keyboard interface, get cheaper, be the best messaging phone, and start hiring some chip designers.

BBM for messages needs to be up and running.

Try to find a buyer for the company. I'm completely serious.

BlackBerry did try to build a touchscreen phone, the Storm, and it was a disaster. Had less features than the original iPhone, no apps and launched right after the iPhone 3G and the App Store.

Tech-wise they were at least two years behind. The App Store and the iOS API would further widen the gap as it was easy to develop on iPhone (I remember high school kids getting their apps on the store) while blackberry still didn't have a stable and consistent API across it's heavily fragmented lineup.

The Key2 is the best phone I've ever owned.

My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the phone world.

My wife has cerebral palsy and needs a hardware keyboard. Therefore we will try to keep BlackBerry phones alive as long as possible. It's a niche market.

I had a blackberry until last year. I love a physical keyboard. I know I'm the minority but I'll never be able to type as well on a screen with no tactile feedback as I can on a physical keyboard.

I don't think anyone prefers the screen keyboard over a real one. I use my phone mainly for consuming information, any typing can wait until I get to a real keyboard. Even when I had a Blackberry, typing was only marginally more tolerable.

>I don't think anyone prefers the screen keyboard over a real one

I like the idea of a physical phone keyboard but I have yet to find one that would allow me to switch language inputs quickly and customize the keyboard as deeply as I want to (taking into account various nonstandard characters)

Which keyboard app do you recommend that can customize character locations?

Multiling-O/Honso keyboard. Any aspect of the keyboard can be customized, but it is obviously a slight hassle

I really love swipe keyboards. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any for LineageOS/F-droid unless you use the Play Store and Google .. which is the trade-off I'm willing to make. (The other one is the loss of a good maps/GPS app, but Garmin does still make and sell regular GPS devices, so..)

It is unbelievably fast getting things done on my BlackBerry Key2 - I can bang off a message or reply to something way faster than on an iPhone or other Android phone. I can touch-type, there are tons of key-based shortcuts, the combined email/messaging/notifications app is the best there is, and yet it's also a touch-screen Android phone.

I picked up a keyone for my personal device after my Nexus 5 bit the dust (it lasted over 5 years), and I'm really happy with it. I had used a few newer android flagship devices as work phones (pixel 3 most recently), but I really hated the huge screen size on everything. I was getting frequent hand cramps on the latest pixel, and one handed usage, even for light browsing was impossible for me (fwiw, I'm a 5'5" woman with hands to match). The smaller screen height of the KeyOne fits my needs perfectly, and having a physical keyboard again is just icing on the cake. Related, this is the first phone where I haven't cracked the screen within the first year (without a case, no less!). I've dropped it a ton on hard surfaces, but it seems that the keyboard cushions the fall, so that was an unexpected benefit.

Also using a KeyOne without a case. After one too many drops on concrete, the frame ended up ever-so-slightly bent out of shape. As per TFA though, everything about the KeyOne is relatively easy to repair when compared to all the other glass-and-glue phones. So far, I've replaced the midframe, keyboard, back cover, and battery, making my phone a mish-mash of the bronze, silver, and black edition.

Strangely enough, my screen has never broken either. It must be something about the keyboard and the nice big bezel.

I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal).

The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.

Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.

That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.

Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.

The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices.

Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.

And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.

The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.

There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.

Can second that. I worked as part of the Home screen team at QNX one summer as a Co-op. That's the entire homescreen, all navigation, integration, accessibility, everything. Grand total? 6 developers and 3 testers.

Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.

> Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone.

But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support.

And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg).

Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?

I'm not 100% sure but one of the biggest differences I felt at the time when Blackberry devices were popular was that the whole ecosystem was pitched and geared towards CTOs and CIOs making purchasing decisions versus the end users actually wanting the devices. An extension of this was the Blackberry software developer kit; it was truly the worst development platform I've worked on in decades. If just really felt like as a user of the platform and a developer RIM didn't really care about anything to make my life easier, they instead focused on checkmarks for the executives or government compliance.

I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]!

Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.

>means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app)

Can't you use a web browser for those things?

Here /Europe/ some banks are starting to require the use of mobile apps for authenticating transactions, instead of providing hardware tokens.

When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.

Government apps no - both require a 'modern' Android or iPhone.

Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)

For track and trace at least, it relies on the Google and Apple contact tracing APIs.

Someone in this thread said that he updated SSL certificates to fix the website issue.

All my best phones were blackberry. From the good old ones up to the Z10. The developer scene at he time of OS10 was so cool! Fantastic devices, such a shame that people enjoyed seeing blackberry die out. I'm still using my playbook, 11 years and going strong

I have a playbook - there is so much to like about it, in particular that it runs QNX and with a terminal emulator (I'd have to look up the name) you have a very cool terminal based tablet, even including it's own elVIs VI editor and python 3.5.

The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.

I had a Curve (colour, no 3G), it was amazing having access to email in my pocket.

However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT, and corporate IT is universally shit, I assume my (dinosaur) company had standard policies - which meant massively locked down, you couldn't install any apps, so there was no way an "app store" would have succeeded selling things like angry birds.

This left space for those with power in the organisations to get an iphone, enjoy playing silly games, see the potential of all the other apps, and then order IT to make email work on their phones so they didn't have to carry a blackberry around.

I remember seeing the first touchscreen blackberry (it was named the Storm).

It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use edge making it even more sluggish.

You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered anyways.

Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of specs.

I seem to recall the whole screen sort of clicking. I don’t remember why it did that though.

It was just another input button. It had capacitive touch and you could also press on the screen as a button. So there was a touch and a click. This more or less replaces the other BB's trackball functionality (which I think you could click as a button). So moving your finger around the touchscreen was like moving the trackball and pressing the screen as a button was like pressing the trackball button.

At a time where most apps were being designed for the touchscreen iPhone, most devs didn't take advantage of the Storm's device specific hardware, which is one of the reasons why it wasn't very memorable...

Ah that makes sense. I never had one myself, I’d moved over to a G1 at that point. But I do miss my old blackberry.

I thought the screen was just loose. Had no clue it was a button.

Granted I only tried one unit.

I used to repair cell phones for a living and OMG that device was so bad. I think they came out with a v2 that was only slightly better. Yes the whole screen was also a button.

It broke really easily in addition to being hard to use.

I have a BlackBerry Key2 and am not sure what to replace it with when it goes kaput. Typing on a touchscreen leads to pain in my finger tips.

I would pay good money for a quality after-market keyboard to snap on to the bottom or side of an iPhone.

I have a Titan set up with all my accounts for when My Key2 finally goes. It's beefier, but more modern.

I'm really hoping Onward doesn't botch the release of their new BlackBerry PKB. Because if that's half good, that Titan will just sit in the drawer :P

If I could get a new blackberry that supports WhatsApp (basically mandatory in my country), I would.

Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.

I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a long time I was capped at whichever the last version that supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of updating the app, which somehow worked.

I wish I could run WhatsApp in a VM in the cloud via Anbox and stream the WhatsApp UI to the phone via something like VNC.

The Android-based BlackBerry phones (including my Key2) all support WhatsApp.

They have a progressive webapp, no?

The web app depends on you being on the same wifi as a real Whatsapp mobile app. It’s more of a desktop solution.

Has my WhatsApp always been connected and I never realized this is a requirement? That’s such an awful requirement. Or is it something like having to connect once a week? Either way I see how it doesn’t work if your only mobile device is a blackberry

I used to be a blackberry developer, granted it was my first job, but nevertheless: I'm glad blackberry died it's slow, painful death.

Developing for blackberry was a disaster, I can even say it was the single worst programming experience I've been through. To name issues off the top of my head:

- signing code with BB's SLOW servers every time you wanted to deploy to a physical device (I'm talking waiting times of 50+ seconds). These servers regularly keeled (there were websites to tell you if they did), meaning you couldn't deploy to a device to test on, which was important because:

- emulators were so far off the actual devices you needed to deploy to multiple devices regularly to make sure you code worked

- devices would restart regularly, and blackberries took a long time to start

- each device, with the same OS, had different quirks, and different APIs would give different outputs depending on a combination of device/OS-version, which was important when those outputs were for things like screen size.

- the developer tools were just not there: things like getting to logs, etc

- heroics were required to do things like override the default blue highlight in a list selector (i forget the name) in order to get our application's design to work right.

I used to do dual Android/Blackberry development, and I hated projects on BB. I am however talking BB OS 5/6/7. Our company wouldn't even invest in developing natively for BB10, we'd just port android.

Good riddance.

As a true lover of the physical keyboard, I tried to love the KeyOne. It was okay; the way the OS handled the screen ratio was a bit wonky, and the camera was pretty lackluster. The device itself was a midranger - it chugged from time to time. Ultimately I sold it because I really wanted a better camera.

As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical keyboard days are done.

In our current era, I think it's too much of a risk to use a mobile email client that isn't capable of IMAP over TLS1.2 (or ideally TLS1.3). And similar for TLS1.2 SMTP submission for outbound.

I wouldn't want to be using a 8 year old Blackberry that only support TLS1.1 to talk to my email server. All of those old crypto schemes have been specifically disabled.

Got a Classic one on a job and fell in love with it too, so I recently bought a used one and now a replacement battery (just have to actually do the replacement ... will be fun given it's not made for it). The keyboard is just lovely and especially coming from ThinkPads the cursor is super good too. Hope I can keep it alive for a long time!

My kingdom for a slick, open Linux phone with a fantastic camera and a keyboard on par with the Curve's.

Pinephone is getting a keyboard attachment. Not sure on the camera quality though

As much as I like having the Pinephone to play with, and I know some dedicated folks are technically able to use it as a daily driver, the hardware quality is far below modern quality, even on entry-level phones. This is pretty noticeable on the camera in particular. I believe it's only 5 megapixels, and the lighting, etc. is not great. Totally understandable considering it's basically a $200 developer platform, but I wouldn't try to compare it to any smartphone I've owned in the last 6-7 years.

On the other hand, it's proved pretty popular. Maybe in a few years when higher-performance open SoC's are released and low-cost hardware improves, a new version will be released that causes the quality difference to close more. The upcoming keyboard attachment you mentioned could certainly drive some neat things on that side as well.

Yes, the infrared touchpad beats the hell out of swiping around the screen!

I can't recall who, but someone showed me a phone with a physical keyboard that had a touchpad built into the keyboard.

Which is to say, if you ran your thumb over the keys without pushing any, a cursor would move on the screen.

Was that a Blackberry?

Yes. My Priv and Key2 both support it, at least if you mean in terms of scrolling functionality.

Keyboard surfaces that doubles as touchpads aren’t exactly a bleeding edge feature, PS3 chatpad has it and it works on PC(IIRC feels broken until calibrated through secret combo shortcut)

My Blackberry Passport has that and it was super cool and useful. It felt great. I miss that keyboard so much.

Blackberry was innovating but nobody cared; tech media loved to mock them and push them down. They lost a marketing war in addition to a product war.

They went after executives and ended up with the sort that tech people hate. I suspect when everyone started thinking about getting cell phones and asked their tech friend, anything but BB was recommended.

It likely was, depending on timeframe. Others have mentioned the Passport and KeyTwo, and I know my KeyOne supports it. That combination would cover at least 2014 and on.

HP had a phone with a similar feature, based on Windows Phone.

It seems the BB stock also popped last week, I wonder what happened there. Was there some WSB induced sort squeeze, or just a simple pump and dump, or did anything positive actually happen with the company itself?

Yeah. Not a short squeeze. But still meme stocks. Nostalgic stocks that feel not too highly valued with potential got some love. The two prominent ones are Blackberry and Nokia.

Besides neither being shorted too much, the other major difference vs meme stocks is how both have rather high market caps already. I think they are the only meme stocks with market caps above $5B before they got pushed up. Nokia being far bigger still. I think Ericsson got a bit of side love too.

Palantir was the most immediate meme stock before GME and short squeezing became a world wide news and cultural event. That also always had a high market cap and is now imo trading at a high valuation, even for the current high valuation times.

I remember growing up in the late 2000s, my father was in the military and blackberrys were the defacto issued phones for employees

I don't have a classic blackberry but the licensed model key Le. I love it :) qwerty for the win. I hope they find another licensee to do qwerty hardware keyboards for Android again.

I actually got hooked on qwerty phones by the Nokia e61. To date the most solid phone I owned. Not very user-friendly by today's standards but it did the job most of the time.

Reminds me of good old time (2010-2011), when my 1st job was doing BlackBerry development.

I wonder if BlackBerry Messenger is still functional?

It was such a relief when the KeyOne came out and I got to use a QWERTY keyboard again - slab-of-glass style phones have been a never-ending exercise in frustration. I have a Key2 now and love it. I can't imagine that I will ever go back.

It was always unrivalled as a comms device.

It was really odd to see the industry shift so hard from that utility.

The Priv is still my all time favourite form factor for a smart phone. Typing benefits are self explanatory but having your thumb off the screen by swiping on the keyboard was super nice. It was a total step backwards switching to a fixed keyboards.

Wish windows phone was kept alive :(

I had an 8330 BB though dang ball would get dirty

The balls were fairly easy to replace.

Yeah I did replace mine at least once, I think I snapped the plate clip off so it was wonky after I put it back together oh well.

I basically come to these sorts of threads to spot any webOS and Windows Phone lovers. And bask in nostalgia and what could have been for a bit. Both OSes will always be cherished by me.

Yeah I loved the Lumia 920, I bought a used one on eBay again just to have it. But yeah sucks it mostly doesn't work. Maybe if there are more legit Windows 10 mobile I can get it on there.

Here here. Yeah :/

They did have the one of the best keyboards next to the Sidekick 2.

if today's BBs had HTC quality keyboards, I'd be using them. I'd readily throw away so much just to get a good keyboard, but BB keyboards are just not well designed for touch typing like HTC ones were.

My kingdom for a new HTC T-Mobile G1/G2 successor!

BlackBerrys been doing alot in the software space these days, i don't think they've been "keeping it alive" with these stock shenanigans

I like the Blackberry Torch form factor, but it was a dud commercially, so what do I know.

Not as bad as the Storm though.

We are using Blackberry UEM for MDM of Android and iOS devices. It works surprisingly well.

Never understood the raves about the keyboard. I've had several PDA or phones with built in keyboard, including multiple Blackberries issued by work. I've detested the typing experience on every one of them. My hands and fingers are pretty small too.

Meanwhile I have relatively large hands and really fat thumbs, and the Blackberry keyboard is the only phone keyboard I don't hate. The absolutely terrible UX of almost all virtual keyboards is the main reason I rarely use my current Android phone. It feels as bad and imprecise to use as those old laptop touchpads.

I'm a huge guy (6'5", big frame), with big thumbs, and my Key2 is the fastest, most productive phone I've ever owned (including various Androids and a couple iPhones). I don't mean fast in terms of raw processing power, I mean in terms of getting things done.

You get used to the keyboard fast. It's soooooo accurate, I can touch-type on it (I haven't had to look at the keyboard once whilst typing this comment), and there are loads of shortcuts, like hitting "w" to open WhatsApp or hitting "t" to get to the top of a list of messages in the BlackBerry email app (called "Hub").

Not only that, but it's an Android phone with a touch screen, so I can use any of the apps anyone else uses too.

I didn’t mind BlackBerry keyboards (for a while in the early 2010s I had a prepaid blackberry and matching Playbook).

But the Sony Ericsson M600i is still my favourite phone keyboard. A modern device using that dual-key rocker QWERTY would be amazing IMHO.

Nordic user here, love the ability to easily write æøå together with English, as I mix between my native language and English.

Love the tactile feedback, the ability to write without looking at the screen, not being dependant on an aggressive typechecker, having the ability to use the keyboard to scroll, attach shortcuts to keys and much more.

My current phone is a KEY2 and my previous was a Blackberry Z10. My primary use is private usage but text heavy and somewhat work related (via BlackBerry Hub although the android Hub+ app doesn't beat the bb10 gesture experience) but I do also use it for various app stuff (not games). It fits all my needs.

Imo. The touch keyboard interface simply doesn't beat having a physical keyboard. when that's said, having the touchscreen is still nice because games and apps are optimized for such handling but for text I'll keep looking forward to the next BlackBerry with keyboard (a new one is presumably being announced in q1 this year).

I have used a lot of smartphones with keyboards in the last 20 years or so. I think it started with a Palm Treo 600[0] and on top of my head I've used plenty of others (in not the right order): HTC Blue Angel[1], Sierra Wireless Voq[2], Nokia Communicator E90[3], Motorola Milestone[4], Motorola Droid 4[5] (where I had to solder the SIM-Card into the phone to use it in Europe), Nokia E71[6] Nokia E75[7], Nokia N900[8] (running Debian on some point), BlackBerry Curve[9], BlackBerry Bold[10], BlackBerry Q5[11], HTC Dream[12] and I probably even forgot some.

I really loved the latest Nokia pones with Symbian S60 as long as it worked. Working browser (Opera Mini), GPS navigation, Emails, Calendar and Contact syncing (via ActiveX I think) and everything with a week long stand-by time.

I would love a recent Android phone with a small form factor, full QWERTZ keyboard (preferabbaly slide-out) and decent camera. But I think the BlackBerry Key2 is the most recent smartphone with a physical keyboard and unfortunately it doesn't get any software updates. Right now I just hate typing on my phone and most of the time I wait until I am at a computer before I respond to any texts or mails I get on my phone.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Wireless_Voq

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_4

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E75

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Curve

10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Bold

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Q5

13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream

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