From my experience as a parent, that market is also very small, because the time between “child is old enough to text and be away from parents for long enough” to “child wants to have a real phone” is not that long.

kinda comes across as building what they want personally, what resonated with me was the potential for just a simple merging of modern stuff with older styles, the beloved blackberry, paired with headphone jack, and sd card, toss in a removable battery? already a fairly viable product with stock android and no other changes. the curated display or whatever... its just push notifications in the order they were delivered.. is this not just what modern push notifications already do? my default is to immediately have push notifications off, unless its a vital app. i assume anyone serious about using their phone as a tool rather than an entertainment device is operating similarly, and they'd be the target market if im reading into this correctly.

Hope that simple idea for the colored button based on what your notification is will catch on, thats pretty neat design.

Blackberry made regular slab phones too and they were massively outsold by the keyboard ones. Why would anyone buy a slab phone running an obscure OS that lacked any major apps, when Android and iPhone were available? The keyboard was always the selling point.

The fact of the matter is that the smartphone market could not support more than a few players. Blackberry was just one of several vendors without vertically integrated supply chains that disappeared: HTC, Nokia, LG and Sony all abandoned the market as well.