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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Not the person you're replying to, but I was a big BB user in the 2000s and had the Blackberry Passport briefly in 2015 to test its Android app compatibility (it was pretty damn compatible!).

What I discovered was that the best BB keyboards for error-free typing were the curved 4-row keyboards on the Bold 9000, 9700 and 9900. The Passport kb was flat, rectangular and only had 3 rows over a very wide layout and placed at the very bottom of the phone, making it cramped to type on. I love the idea of keyboard phones but only BB of yore did it right.

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Completely agree on the curved keyboards. BB Classic was the last proper one and I loved it. Android app compatibility was spot on as well, where it failed, not to RIM's fault, was that you had to hack around google play services, and as a result, apps that did "device security checks", like banking apps, failed.

One notable app that also failed this way was, the irony, the Work suite, soon owned by... BlackBerry. My dear employer dropped BES support and moved to Work, which didn't work on BBs after some time, and that was the end of it (BBOS) for me.

Only BB did it right, but - and I don't know to what extent - it still sits on some amount of IP/patents that cover the doing it right.

miss the bold 9000 so much

it sounds like there is a slow and steady open source community around either replacement q20 keyboards, or a reverse-engineered one? https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/the-blackberry-keyboard-how-...

and the beepy, which runs linux and for some reason has the keyboard blurred out on its homepage https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

> and for some reason

Trademark stuff, as far as I remember.

> For instance, the Beepberry project became Beepy – because of Blackberry, legally speaking, raising an eyebrow at the naming decision; it’s the kind of legal situation we’ve seen happen with projects like Notkia. If you ever get such a letter, please don’t hold any hard feelings towards the company – after all, trademarks can legally be lost if the company doesn’t take action to defend them. From what I gather, BlackBerry’s demands were low, as it goes with such claims – the project was renamed to Beepy going forward, and that’s about it.

I think to poke fun at it, they blur out the keeb haha

A Q20 project has actually launched. The Zinwa Q25 uses the Q20 hardware with a new mainboard and battery. I have one, this comment was written with one, and I can say for damn sure: They're real, and they're fantastic.

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