> As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including the cellular network.
I honestly don't get this. How can calls via the regular cellular network stop working reliably? I'm using a dumbphone that hasn't seen any updates in its entire lifetime and it still works reliably for making calls.
Blackberry was always the weird one out that effectively depended on special service from your provider combined with special tariffs for using them. This is a legacy from when they were explicitly enterprise devices and you couldn't exactly buy them normally.
Similarly, the core functionality of the original BB - email - is no longer supported (though you can probably run it still) because the special server software (BB didn't run normal email originally) was withdrawn. This special server communicated with your phone provider IIRC to handle BB-only special features like email (back when GPRS was barely starting)
Note that this only applies to the older BlackBerry OS (7 and earlier) phones, which used the BES. BB10 and later Android phones worked and will continue to work like any other phone.
The Z10 and Q10 were the first BB10 phones in 2013, and I believe BlackBerry only produced one more BBOS phone after that. After the Classic and Passport in late 2014, BlackBerry switched to Android with the Priv, KeyOne, and Key2 and essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.
Even today some apps like Outlook for Android use Microsoft servers for proxyiing email service and don't connect directly to the mail servers from the phone.
I work for an ISP, and when we provision land lines, its a sort of handshake between the device and our network. Due to older dumbphones provisioning requiring minimal effort, it seems that they don't require the same tools. BlackBerry devices however are running a full-fledged OS that requires support. Since the affected devices are at latest from 2013, it seems reasonable that most of those affected have moved off of said devices.
Thanks for the explanation, though I think I still don't quite understand it. Is there something that's required to be provided by Blackberry on either side to make this work? I would have kind of expected that 2G/3G/etc. are device-agnostic and would work with just about any device with a valid SIM card trying to connect to the network.
I know someone who's using an older pre-Android Blackberry, so I'll have to figure out for them if they need to get a new phone next week. As they only use it very occasionally, I'd be glad if they could keep using it for simply making calls.
> I was more productive with phones that had a physical QWERTY keyboard
I miss those too.
My favorite was the Samsung Sidekick 4G. I was able to modify the keyboard map to include the missing ASCII characters, and actually did a little programming with it. The HTC G1 had a decent keyboard too. After the Sidekick 4G was past its prime, I considered trying to mod a Motorola Photon Q to work with my carrier, but the phone was expensive.
I never really liked the phones that had portrait mode keyboards like the BBs though.
I've been using the unihertz Titan [1] for the last couple of years, and more recently (last 6 months or so) the unihertz Titan pocket [2] - The Titan had a bunch of UX issues, which almost all have been fixed in the pocket version. The cameras on them are very bad, but with the price for the device I was able to pick up a half decent camera cheaper than a flagship phone would have cost me anyway. The battery life is a god send, lasts a whole day of solid use, 2 days+ with minimal usage. All apps I've used work fine with the keyboard, and I'm much more productive using a qwerty keyboard, and the keyboard shortcuts you can assign than I ever would be with a touch screen.
I've been using a BlackBerry Key 2 for the past few years, that I got new. It's a great Android phone with a keyboard. I'm sad they discontinued the line, the build quality is great and the keyboard is great. Fortunately it's just an Android phone so there may come a time when they discontinue support and I have to flash it with a modern distro but that should at least be possible, assuming the phone lasts that long.
That won't be possible unless you own a special unit. The bootloader on these devices is completely locked down and there's no way to unlock it - so you're going to be stuck running the official software forever.
I had a Curve 83xx, it was great. I had a qwerty keyboard phone a few years later and it was terrible in comparison.
Whether the issues with the 83xx are glossed over between both it being my first phone which had practical utility beyond phone/sms and nostalgia, or if there was something particularly good about it, I'm not sure.
I do know that Microsoft should have bought RIM back in 2008, it was their only chance to compete in the mobile market, the blackberry was actually popular in a way XDA etc wasn't.
RIM lost because of stuck-in-the-mud boomer IT departments locking down so the CFO couldn't play candycrush or angry birds on his phone, and Microsoft had a similar mindset back then, so it likely wouldn't have work. Instead CFO buys an iphone, then tells IT to make email work with it, and it's gone. It was the embodiment of the star wars "tighten your grip and systems fall through your grasp" phrase.
The blackberry was the Avro Arrow of our time. I have such animosity toward how they fumbled their market lead, and how Nortel previously lost all its IP to "hackers." As a country we deserved it.
I hope Shopify heeds the lessons of previous examples and stays the hell away from Canadian politics and government, as they too will be smothered with subsidies and breaks with strings attached, and then get taken out by someone who still has to impress consumers and succeeds at it.
> An indication of its importance is that early internal builds of Android looked like a cheap BlackBerry knockoff, rather than the cheap iPhone knockoff that was eventually released.
> Will BlackBerry Android devices still work after EOL date?
> BlackBerry Android devices will not be impacted by the EOL of infrastructure services unless they are receiving redirected email sent to a BlackBerry hosted email address, or assigned an Enhanced Sim Based License (ESBL) or Identity Based License (IBL). ...
I have a BlackBerry playbook and it has not worked properly for years: I think it has something to do with https support or some other aspect of authentication to websites, but 90% of websites don't work with it, even with the latest update which is years old.
It's too bad because the playbook, like other BB devices from that era is running QNX and with a terminal emulator could have been a handy tablet to play with if it could connect properly to the internet
Nooooo this is so sad to hear as I was recently thinking about getting a blackberry for work. I have the Samsung Galaxy S21 though which is my personal phone.
Any chances to flash those phones to alternate open operating systems?
I would expect a load of them to appear shortly in the used market, so it might
be interesting to have something to experiment with while giving the devices another life.
Not really. The older BlackBerries were not powerful enough for any modern OS, whereas more recent ones (i.e., the many Android-based models) have permanently locked bootloaders, meaning that even while some form of Linux might run on them, it will not be able to without the keys.
Readit News
I honestly don't get this. How can calls via the regular cellular network stop working reliably? I'm using a dumbphone that hasn't seen any updates in its entire lifetime and it still works reliably for making calls.
Similarly, the core functionality of the original BB - email - is no longer supported (though you can probably run it still) because the special server software (BB didn't run normal email originally) was withdrawn. This special server communicated with your phone provider IIRC to handle BB-only special features like email (back when GPRS was barely starting)
The Z10 and Q10 were the first BB10 phones in 2013, and I believe BlackBerry only produced one more BBOS phone after that. After the Classic and Passport in late 2014, BlackBerry switched to Android with the Priv, KeyOne, and Key2 and essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.
Yes, service books they were called.
I know someone who's using an older pre-Android Blackberry, so I'll have to figure out for them if they need to get a new phone next week. As they only use it very occasionally, I'd be glad if they could keep using it for simply making calls.
My DevAplha died years ago, but, if you want me to stop using my Q10, you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. Same with my Palm Pre, BTW.
The BlackBerry Passport is one of the affected models, and was released in October 2014. I bought mine new around 2017.
I could touch type and required less autocorrect.
Like autocorrect today still doesn't support typing Spanish with 'vos' conjugations well.
For example it keeps wanting to change the 'to be' verb 'sos' to 'SOS' or a 'SOS' emoji.
Has any of you used modern phones with physical keyboards? How has your experience been?
I miss those too.
My favorite was the Samsung Sidekick 4G. I was able to modify the keyboard map to include the missing ASCII characters, and actually did a little programming with it. The HTC G1 had a decent keyboard too. After the Sidekick 4G was past its prime, I considered trying to mod a Motorola Photon Q to work with my carrier, but the phone was expensive.
I never really liked the phones that had portrait mode keyboards like the BBs though.
[1] - https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products/products/t...
[2] - https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan-pocket
It saddens me that I can't continue to use Blackberry devices. They were amazing.
Duck autocorrect.
Whether the issues with the 83xx are glossed over between both it being my first phone which had practical utility beyond phone/sms and nostalgia, or if there was something particularly good about it, I'm not sure.
I do know that Microsoft should have bought RIM back in 2008, it was their only chance to compete in the mobile market, the blackberry was actually popular in a way XDA etc wasn't.
RIM lost because of stuck-in-the-mud boomer IT departments locking down so the CFO couldn't play candycrush or angry birds on his phone, and Microsoft had a similar mindset back then, so it likely wouldn't have work. Instead CFO buys an iphone, then tells IT to make email work with it, and it's gone. It was the embodiment of the star wars "tighten your grip and systems fall through your grasp" phrase.
I hope Shopify heeds the lessons of previous examples and stays the hell away from Canadian politics and government, as they too will be smothered with subsidies and breaks with strings attached, and then get taken out by someone who still has to impress consumers and succeeds at it.
Heh, I chuckled.
> Will BlackBerry Android devices still work after EOL date?
> BlackBerry Android devices will not be impacted by the EOL of infrastructure services unless they are receiving redirected email sent to a BlackBerry hosted email address, or assigned an Enhanced Sim Based License (ESBL) or Identity Based License (IBL). ...
[1] https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/support/devices/end-of-life
It's too bad because the playbook, like other BB devices from that era is running QNX and with a terminal emulator could have been a handy tablet to play with if it could connect properly to the internet