Blackberry, a popular phone brand, has reportedly become extinct with effect from January 4, 2020, due to the fact that the devices running the original operating system and services are no longer supported and will be finally turned off this week.
The phone brand first announced back in September 2020 that its legacy services would stop working in the first week of the New Year.
The move, however, effectively kills off a line-up that remains popular to this day in some parts of the world for its reliability and security.
It was reported that Waterloo, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM), said handsets running its in-house software will no longer be expected to reliably function after Tuesday 4th January, according to its end-of-life page.
During the past decade, BlackBerry devices and their physical keyboards were once the go-to mobile device both for professionals keeping up with email and younger people messaging on its proprietary platform, known as Black Berry Messenger (BBM).
Following the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and a countless Android handsets with larger displays and better graphics, the company fell behind in market share.
The Canadian company stopped making its own smartphones in 2016, making a shift to a software-only business and licensing its brand and services to TCL Communication Technology Holdings Limited, which continued to release devices until its deal ran out in 2020. The TCL devices were powered by Alphabet Inc’s Android OS and will be supported until August.
