Blackberry News Update Today

Blackberry News Update:

Blackberry phones - once the top of a mobile handset with their trademark physical keyboard - are effectively dead today because the Canadian company behind them pulls its support.

As the company warned on its website, the long-lasting devices - which it has not made since 2016 - "will not reliably function" from 4 January, including for calls and texts.

The fall of the once-ubiquitous boardroom device has been an extended time coming. By 2013, because the mobile world changed with iOS and Android, BlackBerry was posting billion-dollar losses.

Recently at the beginning of 2013, a resurrection was touted for the corporation which even bought an advertising slot during the Super Bowl.

But BlackBerry shipped just 5.9 million phones within the second quarter of that year, far but the nine million new iPhones Apple managed to sell within the first few days after its launch.

© PAThe devices were popular due to their physical keyboards and security features

Another nail was hammered into BlackBerry's coffin when WhatsApp dropped its support for older phones in 2016.

In a blog post the corporation said: "When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people's use of mobile devices looked very different from today.

"The Apple App Store was only a couple of months old. About 70% of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia."

By then, BlackBerry had less than 1% market share and Apple and Samsung dominated worldwide phone sales.

The company itself had completed its transition to a security software business by 2016, which is when it stopped making its own smartphones.

However, it decided to continue maintaining the software "as an expression of thanks" to loyal partners and customers who appreciated its physical keyboard also as its security measures.

Those features may emerge again, but the old phones now fit a little better than recycling.