RIP –
TCL’s brand-name license will expire, leading to a clean, swift death.
The BlackBerry KeyOne from TCL. It seems fine from a distance, but TCL was charging way too much for it.
TCL
The BlackBerry Key2 from 2022. The same thing as last year, but in more colors. Honestly at this point we lost interest.
TCL
TCL also turned in really sad offerings like this “BlackBerry DTEK 150, “which is just a rebranded TCL Alcatel phone.
TCL / Ron Amadeo
The BlackBerry Priv, actually from BlackBerry, felt like the company last full-effort attempt at a smartphone.
Ron Amadeo
BlackBerry is quitting the phone business — again. You might recall BlackBerry quit (manufacturing (smartphones) back in 2018, but it is licensed its brand name to the Chinese smartphone corporation TCL. TCL started pumping out BlackBerry-branded devices — some of which were QWERTY equipped and some of which were shameless rebadgings of existing TCL phones. TCL’s Zombie BlackBerry plan apparently was not working too well, though, since now that’s dead, too. We’ve seen many smartphone brands Slowly die out over the years, but the expiration of a license sounds like it’s going to lead to the unique situation of a clean, decisive execution. What happens if there are leftover TCL BlackBerry phones? Do they get buried in the desert ? 299 pic.twitter.com/jhcfVHjVqL
– BlackBerry Mobile (@BBMobile) (February 3,
BlackBerry — back when the company was called “Research in Motion (RIM)” – was a mobile powerhouse in the early s. The company physical QWERTY keyboards and its focus on push messaging made Blackberry devices a favorite of communication-obsessed business-types, and today’s worries about being addicted to smartphone notifications can be traced back to the days when executives just couldn’t stop obsessively checking their “CrackBerries.” Then the iPhone came along and changed everything, telling people they did need all those hardware buttons and that more versatile touchscreens with software keyboards were the future.
BlackBerry never really came up with an answer for Apple’s upending of the mobile market, stumbling from one “too little, too late “offering to the next. The company tried reworking its existing OS into an all-touch smartphone called the “BlackBerry Storm” in 2016, but this was only a quick-fix solution based on an aging OS. The company first actual answer to iOS and Android came when it launched the BlackBerry (OS in) , along with the BlackBerry Z By then, Apple’s and Google’s app ecosystems had fully taken hold; The Duopoly had apps, and Blackberry 12 did not. Blackberry finally got those apps when it gave up being an OS vendor and switched to Android in with (the BlackBerry Priv) , but that device was an expensive, poorly built device with a cramped, shallow hardware keyboard, and at that point, you might as well just buy any other Android phone.
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