Blackberry bids adieu to mobile mart

HYDERABAD: Once the most sought-after device among the corporate elite, the classic Blackberry mobile phones stopped legacy services starting today. Officially marking the end of an era, Blackberry, in a blog post, informed that all customers who are using legacy devices running BlackBerry 10, BlackBerry 7.1 and earlier and BlackBerry PlayBook 2.1 OS and other versions that services “will no longer be available after January 4, 2022.”

The Blackberry phones, which had the highly convenient Qwerty keyboards, were a great choice for corporate professionals as it offered the messenger service, which was known for its safety. “It was very easy to email using the keyboard. Although it was a bit expensive to use them with high broadband charges in those times, it was totally worth it,” recalled Bharath Verma, a senior software professional.

Having used it in the late 2000s when the devices were seen as a status symbol, it was sad to learn that the devices became defunct, said N. Krishna Murthy, a city-based businessman in the paints industry. “I was so fond of Blackberry that it took me a long time to switch to Android,” he recalled.

Recalling the impact the device had, C.V.D. Ramprasad, a software industry expert, said Blackberry “brought a difference in the way we communicated.” It brought about a transformation in the way people in the corporate world got connected, he added.

Kumar Anand, a senior consultant with an MNC, termed Blackberry stopping the service ‘truly the end of an era.’ “I had the sliding model called Blackberry Torch, which I used until 2014. I used to communicate with a handful of friends through the Blackberry messenger. It was what WhatsApp is now for us back then. About a decade ago, Blackberry handsets were synonymous with a different class of elite.”

The company said devices running the legacy services would no longer reliably function, including data, phone calls, SMS and emergency functionality.