Adeyemi Matthew
Although there are still some people out there who are using
the BlackBerry phone and the company has now announced that it will no longer
support the legacy services over its cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity starting
from next week.
BlackBerry phones, once the height of mobile devices, are
finally being shut off.
The company announced that services for the older devices
will be brought to an end on 4 January. At that point, they will “no longer
reliably function”, BlackBerry said, and will be unable to get data, texts or
make phone calls, including to emergency numbers.
It is just the latest in a series of endings for the once
equally beloved and hated name, which helped drive the mobile revolution and
was at the forefront of business and technology. While the BlackBerry has been
declared dead a number of times before, the latest move means that the phones
themselves will actually stop working.
In 2016, after its phones had been replaced largely by
smartphones from Apple and others, BlackBerry announced that it had
transitioned away from phones and into making software and that it would focus
on providing security tools to companies and governments. It has sold the
BlackBerry brand to other companies, who have created devices bearing the name.
In 2020, BlackBerry said that with that move complete, it
would start taking offline the legacy services that allowed those old devices
to keep working. Phones that run any of BlackBerry’s own operating systems –
BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software – were given an “end of
life or termination date” at the start of 2022.
Next week, that date will finally arrive and support will
end. While the phones will still be able to perform some of their functions
without BlackBerry’s services, many of their central features will be removed,
and the phones will not work reliably.
BlackBerry said the support was being removed in recognition
of the fact that it now works in security software and that the old products
did not reflect its business. It had prolonged support in the years since that
transition “as an expression of thanks to our loyal partners and customers”, it
said.
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