Once dominating the smartphone market in the 2000s, Blackberry is now set to sail into oblivion as the company announced that their devices will stop functioning from January 4th.
Blackberry devices running the original operating system and utilities will be off-support after January 4, marking the end of an remarkable era for the iconic handset.
BlackBerry Ltd, the Ontario based company whose signature devices in the 1990s became synonymous with working on the move, revealed that the devices operating on its in-house software will no longer be functioning reliably. The company formerly known as Research In Motion released the statement in its end-of-life page.
The move, first announced in 2020, effectively kills off a line-up that to this day is loved by a handful of loyal customers for its reliability and security. The Classic BlackBerry devices with their physical keyboards were once the go-to mobile devices for both, the professionals and the younger people only to further dwindle in numbers by the launch of the much flashier and technologically superior iPhones and Android smartphones.
The Canadian company stopped its own smartphone production in 2016 and licensed its brand and services to TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd, which continued to release new devices until 2020. The TCL devices were powered by Alphabet Inc’s Android OS and will be supported until August 2022.
BlackBerry, which now operates as a software-only business, was one of the many meme stocks of 2021 experiencing a massive spike in its share price in January before facing a similarly sharp decline.
The company wrote that functionalities like data/phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 will no longer function reliably and the devices will not receive over the air (OTA) provisioning updates.
