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In the mid-2000s it didn’t get any cooler than the BlackBerry. BlackBerry Messenger was the coolest thing you could do with a smartphone and if you didn’t have it you were a pariah. Brick Breaker was an all-time phone game that could occupy tons of time in waiting rooms or in that intro to meteorology class that you didn’t really want to take. Sure, you could still use SMS text messaging, but BlackBerry Messenger was iMessage before iMessage was even a thing. At their quarterly earnings meeting this morning, BlackBerry announced that they will stop making their own smartphones.
If you really wanted to be cool, you were doing mobile uploads via your Blackberry onto Facebook. That was Instagram before anyone was using Instagram. And then of course, the end all be all of mid-2000s cool, “Sent from my Blackberry.” Boom. That’s a big boy business move. No one else was sending e-mails from their phone in 2006 unless they had a sick BlackBerry. I wasn’t using a BlackBerry until 2010-ish but still. Sending e-mails from one of those things made me feel like a high-powered business executive.
Instead, the Canadian company will rely entirely on external companies for any future hardware projects.
So basically what this boils down to is that someone else will make phones that BlackBerry will sell. The company said that they’ll “have the same look and feel” but we all know what that means. It’s like buying the off-brand Reese’s Puffs at the grocery store. They sort of taste like the real thing but we all know they’re not. BlackBerry’s CEO plans on turning all of their attention to software.
I’m not sure people are making a big enough deal about this. I guess if you never owned a BlackBerry you don’t really know what it was like to have one. You just don’t get it. And that’s perfectly fine, but what me and millions of other people had with BlackBerry was special. BlackBerry is kind of like that girl you never really get over. Like, in the back of my mind I always kind of thought that I’d get back together with BlackBerry at some point even though I’ve always been really happy with my iPhones. I never knew when that time would be, but it just felt like at some point I’d be holding a BlackBerry again instead of an iPhone.
While this is incredibly sad for me and all of the former CrackBerry users out there, I think we can all concede that this was a long time coming. Their phones hadn’t been relevant in years and they just look sad sitting next to shiny new iPhones in your local Verizon store. RIP BlackBerry. You had a hell of a goddamn run. .
[via Business Insider]
Image via Youtube
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jduda@grandex.co
Of course Duda is the one to bemoan the end of Blackberry. I’m sure DeFries will let you take a half day so you can go to some shady flea market outside town and pick up grandma’s old rotary phone so you can continue the next leg of your hipster progression.
Chicago Johnny—->Austin Johnny—->Asshole Johnny—->Hipster Johnny—->Kendra
Brick-Breaker on the BlackBerry – GOAT
On BlackBerry, yes. What about Snake though? You can’t top playing Snake on those Nokia bricks.
đ
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone
RIP, ‘berry.
Mind-boggling that it took Apple so long to get iMessage up to BBM-level of features.
And now iMessage has the ability to send you into an epileptic seizure.
I’m old enough to remember when my job gave everyone blackberries for the first time. The novelty wore off in about 7 minutes.