BlackBerry Phones Set to Officially Die on January 4th!

Once upon a time, in a phone store far far away, BlackBerry represented one of the most prestigious smartphone brands around. While the landscape has certainly changed massively over the last 20 years, it is easy to forget that, for a while, BlackBerry and Nokia were market-leading companies not just for their notably high market share, but also by being representative of some of the most innovative and iconic designs ever seen. Despite some efforts against the swelling tide of competition from Apple, Samsung, and many others, however, back in 2016 BlackBerry officially announced that it was transitioning itself entirely out of the smartphone market.

So, in other words, the clock was officially ticking down for the end of BlackBerry smartphone products. Presuming you are, however, one of the few people still happily using your self-contained keyboard device, then we have some bad news for you. Following a report via Engadget, BlackBerry has confirmed that on January 4th, their entire smartphone range will officially no longer be supported!

BlackBerry Kills Smartphone Support!

So, what does this mean? Well, as many of you probably have already correctly speculated, their smartphone range has already been discontinued for quite some time now. On January 4th, however, BlackBerry has confirmed that its legacy support for their operating system (most recently BlackBerry 10) would be coming to an end, and, by proxy, this would result in a number of their key functions no longer operating.

Now, this doesn’t, of course, mean that the phones will be rendered completely useless overnight. In regards to anything that utilises their own services, however, January 4th will see them either no longer work or, at the very least, no longer function as well (or as reliably) as they once did.

All Good Things…

The move isn’t honestly that surprising. As noted above, BlackBerry has been out of the smartphone market for over 5 years now and the fact that they continued the support for their operating system until now has certainly been a solid gesture of goodwill on their part. Let’s be honest though when was the last time you actually saw someone using a BlackBerry product?

Well, bizarrely (and coincidentally) for me, it was literally just a couple of days ago as following the post-Christmas tidy up I actually found one of their old tablets I owned several years ago. And yes, following a charge, it does still work surprisingly well.

The bottom line though is that for as iconic as it may have once been, on January 4th, in the remits of smartphones and devices, BlackBerry will officially be dead, no more, gone, expired, and nothing more than a fond if mildly mocking memory.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!