Today, older BlackBerrys—the ones that run BlackBerrys own OS, not Android—stop working, because the company is shutting down the servers on which they relied.
We've eulogized BlackBerry before, most notably in 2016 when the company stopped making its own phones and lent its name to Android-powered devices from TCL. But today, BlackBerry is turning off its own hosted servers for provisioning and connecting to cloud services, meaning its older devices won't be able to "reliably function," the company says. Some features may still work, but BlackBerry isn't guaranteeing anything anymore. It's like if Google turned off services to your Android phone, or Apple stopped supporting iOS.
I don't have a BlackBerry 10 device here to test, but some brave souls on the CrackBerry forums are still working to keep their older devices somewhat alive by sideloading Android apps. Still though, that's going to be very kludgey.
I still get emails from BlackBerry owners clinging to their devices not just because of their security and reliability, but also because they are slabs with physical QWERTY keyboards. If you want that feature, there's only one manufacturer left, and it's an obscure one.
QWERTY in Decline
QWERTY keyboards have a long lineage on mobile devices, going back to the late 1990s. They really started to decline when large, capacitive touch screens became cheap enough to create truly functional touch keyboards, in 2007-08, but they took a while to decline from there. Even BlackBerry saw the writing on the wall early, with the disastrous BlackBerry Storm in 2008.
People who still love QWERTY love the tactile feedback and the ability to type with muscle memory. Great QWERTY texters can tap things out without looking, even under a table while they're doing other things—a feat that isn't possible with touch keyboards.
But the flexibility of touch keyboards, and the demand for large displays for video, gaming, and social networking, eventually won out. A new company, OnwardMobility, claimed last year to be developing a QWERTY-keyboarded phone with the BlackBerry brand, but so far it's vaporware.
Only Unihertz Remains
The only company still selling BlackBerry-style QWERTY phones for the US is an obscure Chinese firm called Unihertz.
Unihertz specializes in weird form factors. Its Jelly and Atom lines are tiny, when it's hard to find tiny phones nowadays. Its new TickTock is huge and has a circular rear display, like a watch face. And its Titan line has QWERTY keyboards.
The Planet Computers Astro Slide and the FxTec Pro1x both have physical keyboards, but they're large, horizontal, sliding or clamshell devices, not handheld slabs like the Unihertz phones. Also, neither phone is actually on sale; they're both in a pre-order state, and with the chipset shortage, who knows when they'll deliver.
Unihertz sells two keyboarded, Android-based Titan phones: the $339.99 Titan (very big, like a BlackBerry Passport) and the $299.99 Titan Pocket (smaller, like a BlackBerry Bold.)
We gave both phones good reviews, but they're definitely out of the mainstream of today's smartphone use. They don't have very good cameras, and not all apps work on their small, square screens. They're also clearly lower-cost devices in terms of build quality, not premium, executive devices. But in 2022, they're what we can get.