[HN Gopher] End of the line finally coming for BlackBerry devices
___________________________________________________________________
End of the line finally coming for BlackBerry devices
Author : rbanffy
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-01-01 10:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I was more productive with phones that had a physical QWERTY
| keyboard.
|
| I could touch type and required less autocorrect.
|
| Like autocorrect today still doesn't support typing Spanish with
| 'vos' conjugations well.
|
| For example it keeps wanting to change the 'to be' verb 'sos' to
| 'SOS' or a 'SOS' emoji.
|
| Has any of you used modern phones with physical keyboards? How
| has your experience been?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Maybe your phone is set to Latin American spanish?
| omaranto wrote:
| That wouldn't explain it: vos is used in Argentina, Uruguay,
| Paraguay, Costa Rica and in parts of several other Latin
| American countries.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Like autocorrect today
|
| Duck autocorrect.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I've been using a BlackBerry Key 2 for the past few years, that
| I got new. It's a great Android phone with a keyboard. I'm sad
| they discontinued the line, the build quality is great and the
| keyboard is great. Fortunately it's just an Android phone so
| there may come a time when they discontinue support and I have
| to flash it with a modern distro but that should at least be
| possible, assuming the phone lasts that long.
| dleslie wrote:
| I was using a Key 2 LE until about four months ago.
|
| It saddens me that I can't continue to use Blackberry
| devices. They were amazing.
| GranPC wrote:
| That won't be possible unless you own a special unit. The
| bootloader on these devices is completely locked down and
| there's no way to unlock it - so you're going to be stuck
| running the official software forever.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I had a Curve 83xx, it was great. I had a qwerty keyboard phone
| a few years later and it was terrible in comparison.
|
| Whether the issues with the 83xx are glossed over between both
| it being my first phone which had practical utility beyond
| phone/sms and nostalgia, or if there was something particularly
| good about it, I'm not sure.
|
| I do know that Microsoft should have bought RIM back in 2008,
| it was their only chance to compete in the mobile market, the
| blackberry was actually popular in a way XDA etc wasn't.
|
| RIM lost because of stuck-in-the-mud boomer IT departments
| locking down so the CFO couldn't play candycrush or angry birds
| on his phone, and Microsoft had a similar mindset back then, so
| it likely wouldn't have work. Instead CFO buys an iphone, then
| tells IT to make email work with it, and it's gone. It was the
| embodiment of the star wars "tighten your grip and systems fall
| through your grasp" phrase.
| bszupnick wrote:
| I'm following this project:
| https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
| ansible wrote:
| > _I was more productive with phones that had a physical QWERTY
| keyboard_
|
| I miss those too.
|
| My favorite was the Samsung Sidekick 4G. I was able to modify
| the keyboard map to include the missing ASCII characters, and
| actually did a little programming with it. The HTC G1 had a
| decent keyboard too. After the Sidekick 4G was past its prime,
| I considered trying to mod a Motorola Photon Q to work with my
| carrier, but the phone was expensive.
|
| I never really liked the phones that had portrait mode
| keyboards like the BBs though.
| gregoriol wrote:
| Wondering how many still use these
| simo_dax wrote:
| I still do, and I still mantain an open source Twitter client
| replacing the official one (no longer supported, as most apps
| on the platform). Q10, best phone I've ever had
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Torug wrote:
| Nooooo this is so sad to hear as I was recently thinking about
| getting a blackberry for work. I have the Samsung Galaxy S21
| though which is my personal phone.
| rcfox wrote:
| Were you considering a 9 year old model though? This shouldn't
| affect the newer ones running Android.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Any chances to flash those phones to alternate open operating
| systems? I would expect a load of them to appear shortly in the
| used market, so it might be interesting to have something to
| experiment with while giving the devices another life.
| cunidev wrote:
| Not really. The older BlackBerries were not powerful enough for
| any modern OS, whereas more recent ones (i.e., the many
| Android-based models) have permanently locked bootloaders,
| meaning that even while some form of Linux might run on them,
| it will not be able to without the keys.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| > As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with
| provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the
| ability to join networks, including the cellular network.
|
| I honestly don't get this. How can calls via the regular cellular
| network stop working reliably? I'm using a dumbphone that hasn't
| seen any updates in its entire lifetime and it still works
| reliably for making calls.
| magikaram wrote:
| I work for an ISP, and when we provision land lines, its a sort
| of handshake between the device and our network. Due to older
| dumbphones provisioning requiring minimal effort, it seems that
| they don't require the same tools. BlackBerry devices however
| are running a full-fledged OS that requires support. Since the
| affected devices are at latest from 2013, it seems reasonable
| that most of those affected have moved off of said devices.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > it seems reasonable that most of those affected have moved
| off of said devices.
|
| My DevAplha died years ago, but, if you want me to stop using
| my Q10, you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
| Same with my Palm Pre, BTW.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, though I think I still don't
| quite understand it. Is there something that's required to be
| provided by Blackberry on either side to make this work? I
| would have kind of expected that 2G/3G/etc. are device-
| agnostic and would work with just about any device with a
| valid SIM card trying to connect to the network.
|
| I know someone who's using an older pre-Android Blackberry,
| so I'll have to figure out for them if they need to get a new
| phone next week. As they only use it very occasionally, I'd
| be glad if they could keep using it for simply making calls.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The older Blackberries relied on a centralized server for
| configuration and setup of both public and corporate
| settings.
|
| The devices _should_ be able to make calls and text
| (baseline SMS), but they might error out in various things
| (browser dead, contacts gone, even some menus dead or
| stalling) and if they are reset you might not be able to
| get texting back (since it _might_ not rely on the SIM card
| to set the SMS message center, etc.)
|
| There were so many changes over the years that I'm not sure
| how much will still actually work, but I think it's a given
| that calls will work -- just try to get them to backup
| their contacts somehow, since I think that is the most
| basic info that was read off the SIM card on initial setup
| but not written back.
|
| (I was a PM for BlackBerry services at Vodafone in the
| early 2000s)
| thedrbrian wrote:
| > The older Blackberries relied on a centralized server
| for configuration and setup of both public and corporate
| settings. The devices _should_ be able to make calls and
| text (baseline SMS), but they might error out in various
| things (browser dead, contacts gone, even some menus dead
| or stalling) and if they are reset you might not be able
| to get texting back (since it _might_ not rely on the SIM
| card to set the SMS message center, etc.)
|
| I'm not a programmer , I deal with oily things, but why
| the hell would you rely on a central server for basics
| like SMS? Surely it should have some basic SMS ability if
| only to background text the network for the proper SMS
| setup.
|
| It feels like baked in obsolescence or supreme confidence
| that you'll be around forever to send out the settings.
| rcarmo wrote:
| In a normal phone, you don't need to text anything to get
| the SMS setup - your SIM card should come with the SMS
| Center MSISDN baked in.
|
| But Blackberries just don't operate like that. They never
| did while I was using them (until 2015, IIRC, and I had
| family using theirs for a few more years, so I know the
| setup process remained the same).
| zinekeller wrote:
| > It feels like baked in obsolescence or supreme
| confidence that you'll be around forever to send out the
| settings.
|
| Please pass that message to RIM/BlackBerry. And yes, they
| _did_ feel like that, until Apple have attacked.
|
| As an aside, Most Android phones below ICS are now also
| "dead" (https://support.google.com/android/answer/1031324
| 6?hl=en, note that Honeycomb do not have phone services
| baked in) and cannot be provisioned even for very basic
| service (except for emergency calls).
| amaccuish wrote:
| To further this, BlackBerries relied on a special GPRS
| APN to get access to the internet. BlackBerry had VPNs
| and leased lines with major carriers and Blackberries
| would communicate via the APN to proxies located in
| BlackBerry data centers. All the network config was
| stored on the phone in "Service Books" and could be
| pushed out via carriers or BES Admins.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yes. The Service Book carried a lot of information that
| these days people take for granted on most devices. And
| with the APN down and nothing handshaking and serving a
| default service book (which, incidentally, was served
| over a proprietary TCP connection IIRC), the phone just
| won't get the right configurations.
|
| That is why I said it _should_ still work for base calls
| (and likely SMS), but nothing else, really.
| visiblink wrote:
| I edited an old service book to gain MMS functionality on
| my Bold 9900. My carrier (Koodo Prepaid, Canada) doesn't
| have BIS and never did. If I lose any other functions,
| I'll probably have a look at the other service books to
| find out what's in there.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Thanks for the explanation, though I think I still don't
| quite understand it
|
| The underlying point is that the Blackberry was not your
| average smartphone.
|
| Your average smartphone (assuming it is not carrier locked)
| can be used forever (although it would not be advisable to
| do so due to lack of security and OS updates).
|
| The Blackberry was a wolf in sheep's clothing. It might
| just look like another smartphone, but it had heavy
| upstream dependencies: - Specific
| carrier contracts were required (i.e. similar to when the
| iPhone originally came out, although for a long time now
| you can use an iPhone with any 4G/5G SIM ... this is not
| the case with Blackberry). - If it was an
| enterprise model, you needed to be running Blackberry
| Enterprise Server (BES) somewhere (it would figure out how
| by first doing a phone-home to Blackberry HQ in Canada). If
| it couldn't talk to BES, it became an unusable brick.
| - If it was a consumer model, it needed to phone-home to
| Canada (Blackberry HQ where they ran a "cloud" servers). I
| can't remember if you needed an account in Canada, I
| suspect you did because I think that's how email worked
| (they would login to IMAP on your behalf and push the mails
| to you).
|
| Basically it was a heavily push-orientated model, the
| phones themselves were fairly dumb out of the box.
|
| So I guess the obvious implication here is that the Canada
| datacentre is going to be killed off. At the same time,
| many carriers have no doubt already been removing
| Blackberry plans for new customers already (and perhaps
| nudging existing customers off).
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Right, but that only applies to data and push
| functionality. It's still not clear why vanilla voice and
| SMS functionality would be affected.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The 8000 series was a custom J2ME shell around a pretty
| basic set of services that were completely tied to the
| BES (enterprise server). They even had to be upgraded to
| work with "public", "unbound" e-mail accounts, which were
| all routed through RIM's services.
|
| It was almost a thin client, really.
| amaccuish wrote:
| I actually miss the architecture. Although the
| centralisation had its problems, the efficiency was
| fantastic. Everything was compressed, data was pushed
| instead of pulled, and with BES every device had an
| automatic always on VPN-like connection, like WireGuard.
| And now my phone has to deal with hanging TCP
| connections, IP address changes and ActiveSync just
| crapping out.
| p_l wrote:
| Blackberry was always the weird one out that effectively
| depended on special service from your provider combined with
| special tariffs for using them. This is a legacy from when they
| were explicitly enterprise devices and you couldn't exactly buy
| them normally.
|
| Similarly, the core functionality of the original BB - email -
| is no longer supported (though you can probably run it still)
| because the special server software (BB didn't run normal email
| originally) was withdrawn. This special server communicated
| with your phone provider IIRC to handle BB-only special
| features like email (back when GPRS was barely starting)
| Zenst wrote:
| > Blackberry was always the weird one out that effectively
| depended on special service from your provider
|
| Yes, service books they were called.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Even today some apps like Outlook for Android use Microsoft
| servers for proxyiing email service and don't connect
| directly to the mail servers from the phone.
| p_l wrote:
| Outlook for Android goes a bit differently (depends on your
| Exchange setup).
|
| In case of BB, it was literally a special protocol running
| on the telco network, combined with the special rates, to
| enable live email access when GPRS was, well, new and
| mostly unavailable.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Note that this only applies to the older BlackBerry OS (7 and
| earlier) phones, which used the BES. BB10 and later Android
| phones worked and will continue to work like any other phone.
|
| The Z10 and Q10 were the first BB10 phones in 2013, and I
| believe BlackBerry only produced one more BBOS phone after
| that. After the Classic and Passport in late 2014, BlackBerry
| switched to Android with the Priv, KeyOne, and Key2 and
| essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.
|
| A terrible shame. I used a BB10 and built a couple toy apps
| for it, but it was difficult to publish them from Brazil
| (and the market was, sadly, tiny). It was easier if you
| developed for Android, but still you'd need older APIs.
|
| QNX is an amazing OS, a work of art. I learned C (and vi!)
| on it in the late 80s and it's up there with zOS, and
| Solaris as my favourite proprietary OSs.
| blindfly wrote:
| To add some more detail from when I worked there: We had
| two users which were BES and BIS. Not all devices were
| connected to an enterprise. Consumer-owned devices were
| almost always provisioned using BIS. They tried to later
| push Black Berry ID as a way to get users to take over some
| half-baked control but that was a total flop. The support
| overhead was simply too much.
| dddw wrote:
| Nothing about On Mobility...
| version_five wrote:
| I have a BlackBerry playbook and it has not worked properly for
| years: I think it has something to do with https support or some
| other aspect of authentication to websites, but 90% of websites
| don't work with it, even with the latest update which is years
| old.
|
| It's too bad because the playbook, like other BB devices from
| that era is running QNX and with a terminal emulator could have
| been a handy tablet to play with if it could connect properly to
| the internet
| dleslie wrote:
| You need to update the root certs, which is generally possible
| with most BB devices.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry's
| leadership was blindsided by the iPhone's popularity
|
| Android was blindsided by iPhone reveal, but the developers had
| the foresight to see where it was headed.
| Zenst wrote:
| I worked for Blackberry in the period running up to the iPhone
| launch. Was many tech people in support who saw it as a threat,
| though upper management did not and IMHO some serious mistakes
| were made as they were more focused upon shifting towards
| catering for consumers devices and yet had to keep their
| business offerings going and kind of ended up miss-managing
| both.
|
| Then the whole business culture did change, the rigid suit
| brigade was not so much the core business base and form over
| function seemed to change in balance.
|
| Ironically, was many core blackberry users who stuck with
| earlier models of the phone, shunning the colour screens etc
| and personally, the jog wheel was brilliant for email
| navigation one handed and yet to be equaled for me.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > the jog wheel was brilliant for email navigation
|
| The experience of using one was always great. They took
| usability very seriously in a market that was easily
| impressed with 3D accelerated transitions.
|
| What I really liked was having all messaging streams
| converging into a single app. Now I need to keep two Outlook
| windows (email and calendar) along with another for Teams and
| monitor stuff happening from all sides, as if I'm NORAD for
| messages.
| GranPC wrote:
| The BlackBerry Hub especially on BB10 is quite possibly one
| of the best ways to use a mobile device. It's a shame that
| this concept isn't more popular, but I guess things like
| Matrix and Beeper [0] are still an option.
|
| [0]: https://www.beeper.com/
| metaphor wrote:
| From the EOL FAQ[1]:
|
| > _Will BlackBerry Android devices still work after EOL date?_
|
| > _BlackBerry Android devices will not be impacted by the EOL of
| infrastructure services unless they are receiving redirected
| email sent to a BlackBerry hosted email address, or assigned an
| Enhanced Sim Based License (ESBL) or Identity Based License
| (IBL). ..._
|
| [1] https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/support/devices/end-of-life
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-02 23:01 UTC)