I know someone who's using an older pre-Android Blackberry, so I'll have to figure out for them if they need to get a new phone next week. As they only use it very occasionally, I'd be glad if they could keep using it for simply making calls.
The devices _should_ be able to make calls and text (baseline SMS), but they might error out in various things (browser dead, contacts gone, even some menus dead or stalling) and if they are reset you might not be able to get texting back (since it _might_ not rely on the SIM card to set the SMS message center, etc.)
There were so many changes over the years that I’m not sure how much will still actually work, but I think it’s a given that calls will work — just try to get them to backup their contacts somehow, since I think that is the most basic info that was read off the SIM card on initial setup but not written back.
(I was a PM for BlackBerry services at Vodafone in the early 2000s)
That is why I said it _should_ still work for base calls (and likely SMS), but nothing else, really.
I’m not a programmer , I deal with oily things, but why the hell would you rely on a central server for basics like SMS? Surely it should have some basic SMS ability if only to background text the network for the proper SMS setup.
It feels like baked in obsolescence or supreme confidence that you’ll be around forever to send out the settings.
Please pass that message to RIM/BlackBerry. And yes, they did feel like that, until Apple have attacked.
As an aside, Most Android phones below ICS are now also "dead" (https://support.google.com/android/answer/10313246?hl=en, note that Honeycomb do not have phone services baked in) and cannot be provisioned even for very basic service (except for emergency calls).
But Blackberries just don't operate like that. They never did while I was using them (until 2015, IIRC, and I had family using theirs for a few more years, so I know the setup process remained the same).
The underlying point is that the Blackberry was not your average smartphone.
Your average smartphone (assuming it is not carrier locked) can be used forever (although it would not be advisable to do so due to lack of security and OS updates).
The Blackberry was a wolf in sheep's clothing. It might just look like another smartphone, but it had heavy upstream dependencies:
- Specific carrier contracts were required (i.e. similar to when the iPhone originally came out, although for a long time now you can use an iPhone with any 4G/5G SIM ... this is not the case with Blackberry).
- If it was an enterprise model, you needed to be running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) somewhere (it would figure out how by first doing a phone-home to Blackberry HQ in Canada). If it couldn't talk to BES, it became an unusable brick.
- If it was a consumer model, it needed to phone-home to Canada (Blackberry HQ where they ran a "cloud" servers). I can't remember if you needed an account in Canada, I suspect you did because I think that's how email worked (they would login to IMAP on your behalf and push the mails to you).
So I guess the obvious implication here is that the Canada datacentre is going to be killed off. At the same time, many carriers have no doubt already been removing Blackberry plans for new customers already (and perhaps nudging existing customers off).
It was almost a thin client, really.
My DevAplha died years ago, but, if you want me to stop using my Q10, you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. Same with my Palm Pre, BTW.
The BlackBerry Passport is one of the affected models, and was released in October 2014. I bought mine new around 2017.