---
title: "BlackBerry: the keyboard empire that built the modern phone."
date: 2025-06-12
url: https://remiam.co.uk/notes/blackberry-the-keyboard-empire
tags: [Nostalgia, Hardware, BlackBerry, Looking Back]
read_time_minutes: 6
description: "BlackBerry retrospective — the keyboard, the push email, the enterprise empire, and the design legacy that quietly shaped every modern smartphone."
---

# BlackBerry: the keyboard empire that built the modern phone.

*Published 2025-06-12 · 6 min read · by Liam (Remiam)*

Push email, a clicky keyboard, and a trackball. Before the iPhone made all of it obsolete, BlackBerry made enterprise mobile a real category. Some affection for the device that taught the iPhone what to copy.

BlackBerry handsets stopped shipping new software in 2022. The brand has been licensed, dropped, and licensed again. The devices that defined business mobile for a decade are now nostalgia merchandise. There's a lot to remember.

## What the BlackBerry did first

- Push email. Notifications that mattered, when they mattered. Every modern phone copied this.
- A keyboard you could touch-type on without looking — the QWERTY thumb-board is still missed by a vocal minority.
- Enterprise-grade encryption at the carrier level. BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was the WhatsApp of its day, but secure.
- Battery life of a working week. The 8700 series lasted four days under heavy use.
- A trackball, then a trackpad. The first time a smartphone interface didn't require touching the screen.

## What it meant culturally

- Heads of state used them. Obama famously refused to give his up when he became President.
- Wall Street ran on them. The traders' floor was a sea of red blinking lights.
- London during the 2011 riots ran on BBM — because nobody had built a free, encrypted, fast group chat for the iPhone yet.
- 'CrackBerry' was a real word. Compulsive checking was an actual social phenomenon.

## Why it died

- The iPhone happened in 2007. BlackBerry's response — the Storm — was a touchscreen that physically clicked, an attempt to honour the keyboard while having a touchscreen. It was, charitably, a disaster.
- BlackBerry 10 in 2013 was actually a good OS. It was four years too late.
- Enterprise IT departments stopped mandating BlackBerry and started accepting iPhones. The whole moat collapsed in 24 months.
- Developers chose the iPhone. The app ecosystem story ended the conversation.

> BlackBerry got eaten by the iPhone, and then it spent ten years getting smaller. But there's barely a smartphone in 2025 that doesn't carry some genetic material from a 2005 BlackBerry. The empire's dead. The DNA is everywhere.

## What lasted

- Push notifications. Every iOS and Android phone copies what BlackBerry pioneered.
- End-to-end encrypted messaging — Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp owe a debt to BBM.
- Enterprise mobile device management — a category BlackBerry created and refined before MDM was an acronym.
- The cultural notion that your phone is a piece of work infrastructure. Mixed blessing.

## What we'd take back

- Physical keyboards. The PinePhone has tried. So has Unihertz. There is still a niche audience that would buy one tomorrow.
- Battery life as a serious design constraint, not a marketing line.
- An OS that respected your attention. Notification handling on BlackBerry was, weirdly, better than what most phones ship now.
- Buttons. We miss buttons.

BlackBerry got eaten by the iPhone, and then it spent ten years getting smaller. But there's barely a smartphone in 2025 that doesn't carry some genetic material from a 2005 BlackBerry. The empire's dead. The DNA is everywhere.