Warning: This post contains spoilers for BlackBerry
The BlackBerry movie chronicles the rise and fall of the titular phone and the company behind it, but are BlackBerry cell phones still around after all this time? Directed by Matt Johnson from a screenplay he co-wrote with Matthew Miller, BlackBerry joins a growing slate of biographical dramas about corporate success stories, including The Social Network and, more recently, Ben Affleck’s Air.
BlackBerry’s ending leaves audiences in 2008, a decade or so after the start of Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin’s partnership with Jim Balsillie. Mike Lazaridis is now CEO of Research in Motion, with co-CEO Jim Balsillie having been booted from the board of directors following an SEC investigation, and the BlackBerry Storm is about to be shipped to stores. While the film confirms that BlackBerry no longer has any stake in the cell phone market, it took a while for that to happen, and BlackBerry phones were still in use for several years after the end of the film. As of today, however, the company’s story is a lot different from how it began.
BlackBerry Phones Don’t Work Today (Its Services Were Decommissioned In 2022)
BlackBerry phones are officially defunct and are physically unable to function. In January 2022, BlackBerry Limited CEO John Chen confirmed that the infrastructure — operating system, software, and services — of the BlackBerry, which had been around for two decades, was being decommissioned. Text messages, Wi-Fi, and even data usage would no longer work as they once did. It was the end of an era, but it was also a long time coming, as BlackBerry Limited (previously RIM) had been transitioning into a software company, one with a different purpose than the company had before.
The last phone BlackBerry designed internally was in 2017, with the BlackBerry KeyOne. BlackBerry went in a different direction before completely pivoting to something else. The company’s services being decommissioned was a huge step in a different direction, as BlackBerry shed its past and walked into the future with a new goal and a variety of new services, as well as new leadership, while not straying too far from the groundwork its founders laid.
BlackBerry Phones Were Still Licensed To Other Enterprises After The Company’s 2016 Downfall
Despite BlackBerry’s waning influence in the years after Android and iPhone’s introduction, and after ceasing in-house design of the BlackBerry, the phones were still licensed to other markets, including an Indonesian company, which set up a joint venture that would make, distribute, and market BlackBerry phones. This venture continued through 2018, and produced the BB Merah Putih. BlackBerry’s phones were also licensed to the South Asian market and other international markets. The licensing of the phones came after Research in Motion had become less dominant in the cell phone market, which was being taken over by Apple and the Android operating systems.
By 2016, the company had lost millions in subscribers, from 85 million to 23 million. At the same time BlackBerry phones were being licensed to international companies, BlackBerry Limited began developing vehicle software with car companies like Ford Motor Company and Jaguar Land Rover. Today, BlackBerry is focused on cybersecurity and encryption-based services for various industries, including the medical and automotive industries. The company has come a long way from its early days, and
