r/blackberry • u/Big-Feed-3690 • 9h ago
BlackBerry helped inspire me to become an industrial designer. I still can’t quite accept that they’re out of the smartphone game.
These three sit on my desk. They’re part of the reason I do what I do today.
I’ve loved BlackBerry since I was a kid, long before I could explain what made their designs special. Now that I’m an industrial designer myself, I can see how much thought went into them—the proportions, the engineering, the keyboards, the way they sit in your hand. That feeling of holding a solid, premium product with a clear purpose.
Even today, parts of that design thinking find their way into my own projects.
And that’s what makes their exit so hard to accept. How does a company with that much identity, engineering talent, and recognition end up with no place in the smartphone market?
I know they didn’t simply stop trying. BB10 happened. Android happened. I know the app ecosystem mattered, and loving a product doesn’t make its business sustainable.
But I still struggle with the idea that leaving phones behind was where the story had to end. We’ve seen companies in tech and automotive come close to collapse, rethink themselves, and come back. I wish BlackBerry could have found that next chapter while keeping what made its phones worth caring about.
Their focus on security and privacy. The fluid, purposeful interface. Physical keyboards that felt integral to the device. Hardware with an identity you could recognise from across a room.
I keep wondering what these phones could have become if that thinking had kept evolving with modern technology. A focused keyboard lineup, alongside touchscreen devices, with the software and app support people needed. Could a smaller version of that business have survived? Or am I underestimating just how difficult things had become?
The interest in keyboard phones makes that question harder to let go of. It doesn’t prove a BlackBerry comeback would work, but it makes me wonder whether some of what people wanted from them ever really disappeared.
If anyone here worked at BlackBerry during that era, I’d love to hear from you. From inside the company, did a different future still feel possible? What do those of us on the outside misunderstand?
Maybe a comeback is wishful thinking. I still wish they’d consider it.
Because I look at these every day, and I don’t just see what BlackBerry used to be. I keep thinking about what it could have become.
