> 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(though you can probably run it still) because the special server software (BB didn't run normal email originally) was withdrawn.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.
A terrible shame. I used a BB10 and built a couple toy apps for it, but it was difficult to publish them from Brazil (and the market was, sadly, tiny). It was easier if you developed for Android, but still you’d need older APIs.
QNX is an amazing OS, a work of art. I learned C (and vi!) on it in the late 80s and it’s up there with zOS, and Solaris as my favourite proprietary OSs.
To add some more detail from when I worked there: We had two users which were BES and BIS. Not all devices were connected to an enterprise. Consumer-owned devices were almost always provisioned using BIS. They tried to later push Black Berry ID as a way to get users to take over some half-baked control but that was a total flop. The support overhead was simply too much.
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.
Outlook for Android goes a bit differently (depends on your Exchange setup).
In case of BB, it was literally a special protocol running on the telco network, combined with the special rates, to enable live email access when GPRS was, well, new and mostly unavailable.
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.
The older Blackberries relied on a centralized server for configuration and setup of both public and corporate settings.
The devices _should_ be able to make calls and text (baseline SMS), but they might error out in various things (browser dead, contacts gone, even some menus dead or stalling) and if they are reset you might not be able to get texting back (since it _might_ not rely on the SIM card to set the SMS message center, etc.)
There were so many changes over the years that I’m not sure how much will still actually work, but I think it’s a given that calls will work — just try to get them to backup their contacts somehow, since I think that is the most basic info that was read off the SIM card on initial setup but not written back.
(I was a PM for BlackBerry services at Vodafone in the early 2000s)
To further this, BlackBerries relied on a special GPRS APN to get access to the internet. BlackBerry had VPNs and leased lines with major carriers and Blackberries would communicate via the APN to proxies located in BlackBerry data centers. All the network config was stored on the phone in "Service Books" and could be pushed out via carriers or BES Admins.
Yes. The Service Book carried a lot of information that these days people take for granted on most devices. And with the APN down and nothing handshaking and serving a default service book (which, incidentally, was served over a proprietary TCP connection IIRC), the phone just won't get the right configurations.
That is why I said it _should_ still work for base calls (and likely SMS), but nothing else, really.
I edited an old service book to gain MMS functionality on my Bold 9900. My carrier (Koodo Prepaid, Canada) doesn't have BIS and never did. If I lose any other functions, I'll probably have a look at the other service books to find out what's in there.
> The older Blackberries relied on a centralized server for configuration and setup of both public and corporate settings.
The devices _should_ be able to make calls and text (baseline SMS), but they might error out in various things (browser dead, contacts gone, even some menus dead or stalling) and if they are reset you might not be able to get texting back (since it _might_ not rely on the SIM card to set the SMS message center, etc.)
I’m not a programmer , I deal with oily things, but why the hell would you rely on a central server for basics like SMS?
Surely it should have some basic SMS ability if only to background text the network for the proper SMS setup.
It feels like baked in obsolescence or supreme confidence that you’ll be around forever to send out the settings.
> It feels like baked in obsolescence or supreme confidence that you’ll be around forever to send out the settings.
Please pass that message to RIM/BlackBerry. And yes, they did feel like that, until Apple have attacked.
As an aside, Most Android phones below ICS are now also "dead" (https://support.google.com/android/answer/10313246?hl=en, note that Honeycomb do not have phone services baked in) and cannot be provisioned even for very basic service (except for emergency calls).
In a normal phone, you don't need to text anything to get the SMS setup - your SIM card should come with the SMS Center MSISDN baked in.
But Blackberries just don't operate like that. They never did while I was using them (until 2015, IIRC, and I had family using theirs for a few more years, so I know the setup process remained the same).
> Thanks for the explanation, though I think I still don't quite understand it
The underlying point is that the Blackberry was not your average smartphone.
Your average smartphone (assuming it is not carrier locked) can be used forever (although it would not be advisable to do so due to lack of security and OS updates).
The Blackberry was a wolf in sheep's clothing. It might just look like another smartphone, but it had heavy upstream dependencies:
- Specific carrier contracts were required (i.e. similar to when the iPhone originally came out, although for a long time now you can use an iPhone with any 4G/5G SIM ... this is not the case with Blackberry).
- If it was an enterprise model, you needed to be running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) somewhere (it would figure out how by first doing a phone-home to Blackberry HQ in Canada). If it couldn't talk to BES, it became an unusable brick.
- If it was a consumer model, it needed to phone-home to Canada (Blackberry HQ where they ran a "cloud" servers). I can't remember if you needed an account in Canada, I suspect you did because I think that's how email worked (they would login to IMAP on your behalf and push the mails to you).
Basically it was a heavily push-orientated model, the phones themselves were fairly dumb out of the box.
So I guess the obvious implication here is that the Canada datacentre is going to be killed off. At the same time, many carriers have no doubt already been removing Blackberry plans for new customers already (and perhaps nudging existing customers off).
The 8000 series was a custom J2ME shell around a pretty basic set of services that were completely tied to the BES (enterprise server). They even had to be upgraded to work with "public", "unbound" e-mail accounts, which were all routed through RIM's services.
I actually miss the architecture. Although the centralisation had its problems, the efficiency was fantastic. Everything was compressed, data was pushed instead of pulled, and with BES every device had an automatic always on VPN-like connection, like WireGuard. And now my phone has to deal with hanging TCP connections, IP address changes and ActiveSync just crapping out.
> 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.
I still do, and I still mantain an open source Twitter client replacing the official one (no longer supported, as most apps on the platform). Q10, best phone I've ever had
Indeed a lot of doubt. They said they would launch a phone in 2021, however about halfway that year it has been very silent from their end.
It's sad really, would love an up to date android with a blackberry keyboard.
I worked for Blackberry in the period running up to the iPhone launch. Was many tech people in support who saw it as a threat, though upper management did not and IMHO some serious mistakes were made as they were more focused upon shifting towards catering for consumers devices and yet had to keep their business offerings going and kind of ended up miss-managing both.
Then the whole business culture did change, the rigid suit brigade was not so much the core business base and form over function seemed to change in balance.
Ironically, was many core blackberry users who stuck with earlier models of the phone, shunning the colour screens etc and personally, the jog wheel was brilliant for email navigation one handed and yet to be equaled for me.
> the jog wheel was brilliant for email navigation
The experience of using one was always great. They took usability very seriously in a market that was easily impressed with 3D accelerated transitions.
What I really liked was having all messaging streams converging into a single app. Now I need to keep two Outlook windows (email and calendar) along with another for Teams and monitor stuff happening from all sides, as if I’m NORAD for messages.
The BlackBerry Hub especially on BB10 is quite possibly one of the best ways to use a mobile device. It's a shame that this concept isn't more popular, but I guess things like Matrix and Beeper [0] are still an option.
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.