Meet the People Keeping BlackBerry Alive in 2021

‘What can I say—I just love the keyboard’

Illustration: Simoul Alva

Maxime Morin, a 35-year-old marketer in Quebec, first started tinkering with his phone out of curiosity. What was this device, a BlackBerry Torch with a sliding screen and full physical keyboard, capable of? How did its mechanical parts fit together and work? There was a lot to explore within this handheld gadget.

And then, of course, it broke.

There weren’t many good online tutorials about how to fix the thing, which first came out more than a decade ago. Morin bought a working Torch for comparison and toyed around with both devices until he figured out what was wrong with his broken one.

So began an obsession. Morin started to collect BlackBerries: the Torch, Bold, Tour, Curve, Q5, Passport, and Q10, an entire family of clicky keyboard smartphones. He would remove components from his devices to figure out what they were for, gradually learning how to switch out different parts to customize and upgrade them.

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