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Comment by squibonpig | Hacker News Reader

I mean, did it do 80% of the stuff? Devices have changed a lot.

I've never used a Blackberry but it was much more efficient for me to input text (an essential task for a communication device!) on non-iPhone-style phones with physical buttons.

Nothing useful to add except, god I miss my Bold 9700. Every time I slip on this stupid touchscreen keyboard and make a stupid typo on this stupid phone I howl inwardly and wish pain and endless torment upon everyone who took us down this path away from light and goodness. Grumble grumble

The fun part for me is that an old dumb phone could replace, like, 50% of my smartphone usage, if I could use Telegram on it. We even still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down. So, a J2ME Telegram client has been on my list of potential future projects for quite some time.

It did, and some of the things it was more effective at.

I remember BlackBerry OS 4.x (?) had a built-in password manager app and this was in the mid-2000s. By comparison this was added to iOS 18 in 2024.

What it wasn't good at was things like games and toxic consumer rich media bullshit. The industry saw dollar signs with iOS and Android and never wrote apps for the ecosystem.

Remember the days when Instagram was iOS-only?

But here we are, resigned to typing on glass for the rest of our lives because some hippie burnout thought it was a good idea.

You may be intetested in this, if you haven't seen it already.

https://crackberry.com/clicks-communicator

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