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BlackBerry phones are officially dead
In This Article
BlackBerry has finally pulled the plug on its classic business-focused phones, making old-school BlackBerry phones effectively unusable.
Towards theend of December, the pioneering smartphone company announced its plans to switch off all of the services supporting its BlackBerry OS devices. Now, on January 4, that day of reckoning has arrived.
From today, anyone using a BlackBerry device running any variant of BlackBerry OS (including the tablet-based BlackBerry PlayBook OS) will be unable to make or receive calls, send texts, use Wi-Fi, or access mobile data. While they haven’t exactly been bricked, they’re now functionally useless.
In a relatedblog post, BlackBerry Executive Chairman and CEO John Chen announced that “As of today, BlackBerry has decommissioned the infrastructure and services used by our legacy software and phone operating systems which are over 20 years old now”.
It’s been a long, slow death for the initial dominant force in the fledgling smartphone industry. Following years of iPhone and Android-induced decline, and a last-gasp attempt at relevancy with the Android-poweredBlackBerry Priv, Chen announced in 2016 that the company had transitioned to being a software security company.
From this point on, the company stopped making BlackBerry devices altogether. It did, however, license the BlackBerry brand out, with the likes of theBlackBerry Key2(pictured) built by TCL and running on Google’s Android OS – albeit with a healthy smattering of BlackBerry’s famously secure software layered on top.
These late-era Android-powered devices will be unaffected by today’s big switch-off.
It’s not all doom and gloom for die-hard BlackBerry fans, however. Referencing his company’s current prominent position in the “intelligent security” software field, Chen said that the “Chances are, we are more a part of your life today than we ever were as a handset company, though you may not even realize it.”
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Jon is a seasoned freelance writer who started covering games and apps in 2007 before expanding into smartphones and consumer tech, dabbling in lifestyle and media coverage along the way. Besides bein…
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
