So BlackBerry announced last Monday that it's basically put itself up for sale. A special committee, "strategic alternatives," all the vague boardroom language that means "we're looking for a buyer and hoping somebody bites." The stock jumped something like ten percent on the news, which tells you everything about how low expectations had gotten. I read the story on my laptop Monday night and then, out of some reflex I can't fully explain, picked up my old Bold 9900 off the nightstand and just looked at it for a minute.
I still carry that thing. Not as my main phone, obviously, my main phone is an iPhone 5 like everyone else's at this point, but the Bold lives in my bag as a BBM machine and backup email checker. Three of my closest friends are still BBM holdouts. It's not on iOS or Android yet (they keep saying it's coming, we'll see), so if I want the little "D" for delivered and "R" for read without switching to iMessage and hoping everyone's actually got iMessage turned on, I need this brick charged. And it is a brick. Compared to the iPhone it's thick and a little heavy in the hand in a way that used to feel substantial and now just feels dated.
Here's my actual hot take though, and I'll get flamed for it in the comments probably: the keyboard is still better than anything I type on now. Not "better for nostalgia," just better, mechanically. I can text with my thumbs at full speed without looking at the screen, in the dark, while walking. Try that on glass. Every review of the Z10 this year (rightly) tore into BlackBerry for being late to the touchscreen party, and the Z10 has genuinely sold terribly, but nobody in those reviews stops to admit that the keyboard on the Bold or the Q10 does one specific job better than anything else on the market. It's just that "one specific job" turned out not to be enough to save a company.
What gets me about the sale news isn't even the business side, honestly, though I do wonder who'd actually want to buy this. It's that BlackBerry used to be the thing. I got my first one in college, a Curve with the little trackball that stuck if you didn't clean it every few weeks, and having a BlackBerry meant something. It meant your parents thought you were serious about your internship. Now it's the punchline. Same company (they dropped the "Research In Motion" name back in January, which in hindsight looks like rearranging furniture on a sinking boat), same devices basically, and the entire cultural read on it flipped in about three years.
The browser is still garbage, for what it's worth. I'll give the critics that one for free. Loading a normal website on this thing at 11pm last night while it charged via that weird pretzel-shaped micro-USB cable that never quite seats right on the first try, I watched a page render top to bottom like it was 2009. That part I don't miss and won't defend.
I don't know what happens to BlackBerry from here. Maybe somebody takes it private and quietly runs it as an enterprise and government devices company for the next decade, which honestly might be the healthiest outcome for everyone involved, including me and my dumb sentimental attachment to a keyboard. Maybe nobody bites and it just limps along. Either way I'm not switching my BBM habit off overnight just because the parent company had a rough Monday. Old habits, old hardware, old friends who refuse to leave a messaging app. That's apparently enough to keep a nine-year-old phone charged on my nightstand in 2013, company sale or no company sale.