Goodbye BlackBerry, the time of the end has come for the ancestors of smartphones

BlackBerry announced that from 4 January 2022 the devices on which the company’s operating systems are still running will no longer receive updates to the services necessary for calls, text messages or connection to the mobile network.

For handhelds with physical keyboards, relics of a pre-smartphone era during which BlackBerry dominated the market, the terminus has arrived. The absence of new updates to the provisioning services will render all devices that are still running BlackBerry 7.1 or BlackBerry 10 unusable, the firmware with which in 2013 the Canadian company had attempted a failed reboot of the brand.

Hard to think that the end of provisioning updates could create particular problems for users: the announcement is interesting BlackBerry models prior to 2013 only, collectibles now used only by very few enthusiasts. In 2015 the company had tried to propose a smartphone model based on Android, but the response from the market was very bad. This is how it came in 2016 the sale of the brand to the Chinese manufacturer Tcl, and the transition from a hardware company to an enterprise cybersecurity solution provider.

Android-based BlackBerry smartphones produced first by BlackBerry Limited and then by Tcl they will continue to work in any case. The only exceptions are the emails and redirects managed by the BlackBerry servers, which will also be disconnected, and the Esbl or Ibl licenses used at the company level, on which practically no company has relied on for years now.

The January 4, 2022 will therefore go down in history as the definitive date of death of the BlackBerry, even if the unfortunate fate of the brand was now very clear more than a year and a half: after a few attempts to revive the tradition of the physical keyboard on smartphones, which ended badly, Tcl also threw in the towel. The license for the production of hardware stipulated between BlackBerry and the Chinese company expired in August 2020 and has not been renewed. An unknown Texan company called OnwardMobility had announced plans to resurrect the brand in 2021 with a 5G device with a physical keyboard. The year is over, and nothing has been heard of the infamous new BlackBerry.