With version 7 a dead end, the company focused its attention on BlackBerry Tablet OS. There were a few more all-touch models from the Curve and Torch series, but they didn't strike it big either. Not that the 2.8" landscape display could offer the same versatility as the all-touch smartphones of 2011. But even with this one the touchscreen was underutilized. These ran BlackBerry OS 7, the last version that was part of the original lineage. Next came the Storm 2, which removed the physical button and tried to fake the clicky feeling, but this also failed to to attract positive attention from would-be buyers.Ī couple of years later the company tried another approach - the Bold Touch series kept the hardware QWERTY keyboard, but added touch support to the display. It didn't help that BlackBerry 5, an OS designed for trackball navigation, just didn't play well with touch input (the same thing happened to Symbian). Having the whole display as one large physical button felt weird and didn't work as well as expected. It wasn't the first time this was tried - remember the BlackBerry Storm? The company was keen to preserve the haptic feedback of real keys, so it mounted the display on the so-called SurePress tech, which made the display clicky. That was a big step as the keyboard is where the name "BlackBerry" came from - the characteristic shape of the keys was reminiscent of the druplets of a blackberry. We already looked at the BlackBerry Z10 that introduced the new OS to the world and that omitted the trademark feature of the phones, their keyboard. And that's just what happened as the company made the switch to Android, eventually handing off the hardware details to TCL.īefore that happened came BlackBerry 10 - a brand new OS developed with touch support in mind. ![]() As the saying goes "if you can't beat them, join them". ![]() BlackBerry made some improvements, but they weren't enough to keep up with iOS and Android. While they supported apps, they had trouble adapting to the new smartphone era. ![]() Their hardware QWERTY keyboards, advanced instant messaging and serious business attitude made them quite popular in the early noughties. This is the end of a legacy that stretches back over two decades with the earliest BlackBerry messengers. They can't access the Internet, send messages or make calls, not even to emergency services. Earlier this week we waved goodbye to the classic BlackBerry devices - all the ones that came before the brand's pivot to Android stopped working on January 4 2022.
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