When Keyboards Were King: A Final Farewell To BlackBerry
As support for BlackBerry OS goes away, a moment to reflect on a time when the phone everyone wanted had a keyboard.
The first proper smartphone that I owned was a Nokia phone. It was called the Nokia E71, which I loved so much that I later replaced it with the Nokia E72. These phones were released in 2008 and 2009, respectively. I wasn’t sold on the iPhone at that time and was always a bit of a contrarian with gadgets and wanted something a little different. But even I had to admit that it felt a bit like a copy of a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry was, at the time, a titan in the still-developing smartphone industry. They had pioneered mobile e-mail and the smartphone as a whole. But numerous blunders which exposed a lack of foresight and arrogance eventually became their undoing. Today, many people have long forgotten BlackBerry, as Apple and Samsung have come to dominate the smartphone conversation. But as BlackBerry devices running the BBOS software will no longer be properly supported by the company, now feels like as good of a time as any to reflect on how the company innovated our pocket computers only to be outdone and fade away due to lacking that same innovation.
