News
Friday 04 August 2023 2:22 pm
“Want to feel old…?” has change into a drained meme – nevertheless seriously, want to feel old? Blackberry, the world’s first smartphone and once the largest company in Canada, is now such a nostalgic legacy product that it’s the subject of a movie being released later this year.
In a stale life as a tech reporter I was once interviewed on Sky News for the duration of the then-infamous Blackberry outage of 2011, which saw services for users across the world lumber dark for three total days. The company was already way past its early 2000s heyday and the presenter asked if this can be the cessation of the line. “Now not but,” I said. “Nevertheless it’s another brick in the wall.”
That wall came nearer to completion last year when the company decommissioned its email and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) services, as neatly as a raft of other features. It’s now now not fairly dead but – although it misplaced extra than a billion dollars last year – nevertheless it feels treasure a company on cessation of life beef up.
This may well hardly be extra strongly underlined than by a film, Blackberry, focusing on “The ‘actual tale’ of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.”
Following sizzling on the heels of movies together with Tetris and The Beanie Bubble, it’s designed to punch of us in their 40s suitable in the nostalgia glands. Few of us that age (my age) will have made it via their 20s without owning a Blackberry, once the world’s coolest communications tool, and one whose legacy is level-headed visible today in services treasure Apple’s Messages software.
It’s hard to imagine, nevertheless once upon a time, Blackberry was if reality be told cold. In the early 2000s it was the early adopter’s tool of preference, with its revolutionary email capability, its fat keyboard (!) and that distinctive rollerball that would clog up ought to you appeared at it laughable. Apple ate its lunch with the first iPhone (2007) nevertheless Blackberry had a resurgence in the 2010s when it became an now now not going figurehead for resistance, with BBM offering cessation-to-cessation encryption that allowed users to organise protests without the risk of their messages being intercepted.
Nevertheless the rot had already role in – the most remarkable factor is that Blackberry level-headed exists in any acquire at all today. Apart from a nostalgic movie, that is: that remarkable was inevitable.
- Blackberry, starring Matt Johnson and Jay Baruchel is out on 6 October