BlackBerry Is Planning a Comeback. For Some, It Never Left
It was nearly all over on August 31. BlackBerry owners had known it was coming for six months. TCL, which had been making Android phones under the BlackBerry name since 2017, was out, “no longer selling BlackBerry-branded mobile devices.” Then, just 12 days before the deadline and the latest in a long line of blows to BB phone fans, in steps Texas-based Onward Mobility with promises of a new 5G Android BlackBerry in 2021.
“I want more information to be released on the new BlackBerry,” redditor petiteging posted on the r/blackberry subreddit a few weeks later. “I’m dying to know more … been a user for 10 years. I thought they were done for good. By far the best news of 2020 for me.”
Posts on r/blackberry, which was created in October 2008 and currently has 12,000 members, tend to range from spotting BlackBerry’s influence—like the BB trackpad on a Mercedes dashboard—to lots and lots of crowdsourced troubleshooting, to gems like a teenager getting nostalgic over playing Brick Breaker on a BlackBerry Bold in the ’00s. There’s also a contingent of former RIM employees active in the comments and some proud Canadians on there, too. BlackBerry Limited, formerly Research in Motion, is now an enterprise security software and IoT company, and is still based in Waterloo, Ontario.
