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How BlackBerry Messenger set texting free

2025-10-18T22:10:36-04:00

Version History

It's important to remember that two decades ago, text messages cost 10 cents. Each. Back when we measured our cell phone plans in minutes, and when even 3G connections felt fast, text messages were a huge business for wireless carriers and a huge expense for anyone whose kids learned to T9-type just a little too quickly. Then BlackBerry, nearing the peak of its powers, did something remarkable: it cut the carriers out entirely. Before WhatsApp and Telegram, before iMessage and RCS, there was BlackBerry Messenger. And while we don't use BBM anymore, we owe it a debt of gratitude. And a few dimes.

In this episode of Version History, our new s …

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BlackBerry director Matt Johnson on why the iPhone won and why most tech movies suck

2023-05-03T09:30:00-04:00

The BlackBerry started as a messy prototype — and eventually kind of took over the world. | Illustration by William Joel / The Verge; Image: IFC Films

You probably already know the story of BlackBerry. Its demise was as spectacular and public as anything you can think of, from a top-of-the-world gadget that people referred to as an addiction - the CrackBerry phenomenon was no joke - to just another of the many things left for dead by the iPhone. Talking about the BlackBerry now is like talking about, I don't know, the Walkman or the Flip camera. They lived, they died, the end.

And yet, I was totally riveted by BlackBerry, the new movie directed by Matt Johnson about the rise and fall of Research In Motion (RIM) and the epic product it created. The movie is stylistically somewhere in the m …

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Dennis from It’s Always Sunny is starring in a film about the rise and fall of BlackBerry

2022-08-24T06:38:45-04:00

Well, we didn't know this one was coming: they're making a film about former-mobile-titan BlackBerry, and it's going to star Glenn Howerton of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as the company's co-CEO, Jim Balsillie. According to The Globe and Mail, production wrapped this week, though when exactly the film will hit cinemas is unknown.

The film, simply titled BlackBerry, is based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by journalists Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. According to its blurb, the book focuses on "an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harva …

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The BlackBerry Storm showed why you should never turn a touchscreen into a button

2022-03-31T09:00:00-04:00

In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, "What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?"

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of t …

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Startup’s planned 5G Blackberry revival is officially dead

2022-02-22T06:02:21-05:00

A close up of 2015’s Blackberry Priv. | Image: The Verge

OnwardMobility, the startup hoping to revive Blackberry phones with a 5G keyboard-equipped Android device, is ending its work on the phone and shutting down as a company. "It is with great sadness that we announce that OnwardMobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard," the company wrote in a statement on its website.

The announcement doesn't come as much of a surprise given reports that OnwardMobility's 5G Blackberry had been cancelled earlier this month. But at the time there was speculation that the company might live on and attempt to pro …

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Startup’s 5G Blackberry revival is reportedly no more

2022-02-11T07:02:54-05:00

A close-up of the 2015 BlackBerry Priv. | Image: The Verge

Plans to resurrect the Blackberry brand with a new keyboard-equipped 5G Android device have been shelved, according to reports from Android Police and CrackBerry. Development on the device was announced in 2020 by Texas-based startup OnwardMobility, after it licensed the brand name from Blackberry. The device was rumored to use a similar design to 2015's Blackberry Priv - which had a physical keyboard that could be revealed with a slide of its screen - with a release date planned for some time in 2021.

That, obviously, didn't happen, but there were signs of life earlier this year when OnwardMobility published a blog post titled "Contrary to …

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BlackBerry will die on January 4th — for real this time

2021-12-31T06:42:27-05:00

QWERTY and quirky — Blackberry’s later Android incarnations retained the famous keyboard. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Dear friends, we're gathered here today to mourn the death of that once-beloved monarch of the mobile world: BlackBerry. And, yes, I realize that this is not the first time we've announced the death of the company or its devices (and, for reasons I'll explain below, it likely won't be the last) but this is a very definite ending for legacy BlackBerry hardware.

As of January 4th, any phones or tablets running BlackBerry's own software - that's BlackBerry 7.1 or earlier, BlackBerry 10, or its tablet operating system BlackBerry PlayBook - will "no longer reliably function," says the company. Whether on Wi-Fi or cellular, there'll be no guarant …

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A new 5G BlackBerry phone with Android and a physical keyboard will arrive in 2021

2020-08-19T09:12:50-04:00

A close-up of the keyboard of 2015’s BlackBerry Priv.

The once-respected BlackBerry brand has been licensed yet again by a company hoping to use a familiar name to make a dent in the competitive Android phone market. This time, it's a new Texas startup named OnwardMobility that's taking the reins, promising to release a 5G BlackBerry device with Android and a physical QWERTY keyboard in 2021.

Little else is known about the device, including screen size or internal specs, but OnwardMobility told The Register it would come with a completely new keyboard design that will "reflect the brand values from a keyboard typing experience and input experience." Which, yeah, sure! I love to reflect brand v …

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BlackBerry phones could disappear as TCL partnership ends

2020-02-03T09:54:25-05:00

The brand keeping BlackBerry phones alive across most of the globe, TCL Communications, plans to stop selling BlackBerry phones later this year. In a tweet this morning, TCL announced that it "will no longer be selling" BlackBerry-branded phones as of August 31st, 2020, because it will no longer have the rights to design and manufacture them. Existing devices will continue to be supported.

BlackBerry decided in 2016 to stop making its own phones, after years of failures, and to license its brand out instead. The biggest licensing deal was with TCL, which since December 2016 has had the near-global rights to design and sell BlackBerry-brande …

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BlackBerry Messenger (yes, that BBM) is shutting down on May 31st

2019-04-18T14:41:38-04:00

Clutch your old BlackBerries dear, because the consumer version of BBM is officially dying at the end of May. In a blog post, Emtek (the company that has taken over running the BBM app since 2016) has announced that it will end support for the messaging app on May 31st, citing fleeting users over the past years despite efforts to revitalize the app with features like Uber hailing and video calling.

"We are proud of what we have built to date … The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on," the company wrote in a bl …

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