BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired
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That sounds pretty rad. I'm almost 40 and haven't ever seen this either. Perhaps it was just the coke addicted business tycoons of the 1980s and '90s that got to experience this tech.
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I still have mine too, and really for the same reason. It is such a great design, and the aesthetic of a water-smoothed river stone was really cohesive. The Pre was all smooth lines and soft curves. Just gorgeous.
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Even after they stopped producing phones, they could have made a killing licensing the patent to phone case manufacturers.
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For reference I have large hands and throught the original huge Xbox "Duke" Controller was comfortable.
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This was hilarious
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It still blows my mind how fast my friends and I were able to text on feature phones with T9.
I wonder if the suggestions ended up shaping our language patterns.
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I found one of those in the back of a taxi before my first smartphone.
I read through the guys messages and decided he was an abusive asshat. Kept it, wiped it, used it as an mp3 player until the screen cracked in my back pocket.
To this day I cringe whenever I see someone keeping their phone in a back pocket.
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It was the first good phone. It was great to have the Verizon marketing thrown at an Android flagship phone.
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I actually have one and itās actually SUPER secure. Zero risk of it sliding out. Itās plastic all around and not flimsy rubber.
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I used a Q10 as my first phone and I miss the keyboard so much, hopefully someone does something cool now
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Yes, the sidekick LX was the perfect phone, it's too bad they shit the bed when they tried to bring it back with Android.
As far as androids with keyboards, the Moto Droid and the HTC G2 really hit the sweet spot. They are tiny little things though compared to current flagships.
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If only they werenāt so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.
I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.
So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I donāt know how to explain, but heād come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had ālostā their status and hence become a āmainstreamā device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.
I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didnāt make sense. They didnāt have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.
It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because theyād use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didnāt integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didnāt have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).
I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.
Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Likeā¦ people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.
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I used a Palm Zire 31 and Later a Dell Axim 51v (Windows Mobile) in high school. People thought I was weird, but it kept me organized. I miss how simple and functional those programs were. This was largely pre-enshittification. No built in keyboard on either, but physical buttons alone are a strength.
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Exactly. I had the pre 3 afterwards, but I kept the original pre
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SEND IN THE CLONES!
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I was pretty good with T9 back in the day, then the keyboard on the BB Pearl changed everything. I loved the keyboard on the BB Curve the best, banged out tons of messages with friends with BB messenger.
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tell me about it. iāve recently been sort of forced to switch from android to ios (some special circumstance) and holy shit, the virtual keyboard is atrocious.
I would immediately jump on a blackberry keyboard phone when and if one ever gets released.
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Loved that phone! I had a little gamepad for it that would click onto the keyboard. I ran emulators on it, perfect for my daily commute to uni.
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I never had a blackberry, but gained a hatred of them. Not for anything the phone was, but at how bad at software they were. The blackberry software to allow them to read emails from the company mail server was an over bloated, buggy and slow POS. It would forever break and the solution was always to remove and re-add it which would take a day and disrupt email for everyone.
But some CEO "needed" to use a blackberry as it looked corporate.
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It's wild to me how hodgepodge the software was. It's the software equivalent of the Ford pinto, great and then boom! But for a long time it's all there was.
There were competitors, but nothing offered everything like the blackberry platform in the early 2000s, the (user facing) software and keyboard combo were nuts, and when the trackball was released (Curve? Pearl? Idk) it was like having a little computer in your pocket.
