SEND IN THE CLONES!

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.

I've been swiping for years. I can't believe no one else in my tight circle does it.

I can’t get my head round it.

I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.

This was hilarious

I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.

I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.

So for 20 years, it wasn't possible for anyone but BlackBerry to manufacture phones with the revolutionary technology of... checks notes... keyboards, and now that it is irrelevant to modern devices, is free for anyone to use.

Patents should be abolished.

Can someone explain how something as generic as a keyboard can be a subject to patents?

I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway. I just got in the habit of making hours of changes and then deploying while I went to lunch and testing everything afterwards; definitely not a programming best practice but the only way to make it work.

The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn't anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.

The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn't possible with touchscreens.

More like Research In Place than RIM

I've always swiped but somehow just installed voice to text last week. Game changer!

I'm in too many places where chatting to my phone wouldn't go over well.

Damn, I wish I'd thought of that back then.

I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.

I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan

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.

I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet

I hope we see more keyboard phones. I'd buy an iPhone with a keyboard.