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Once a status symbol, today a committee: the Blackberry
Photo: Peter Steffen / dpa
Blackberry phones with the old in-house operating systems of the smartphone pioneer will soon no longer work.
Devices with the operating systems Blackberry OS 7.1 and 10 will no longer work reliably from next Tuesday, as the company recalled at the turn of the year.
Blackberry gave up developing its own smartphones and operating systems a few years ago and focuses on software for companies.
Newer Blackberry smartphones that run with the Android operating system will continue to work. The Canadian company switched to Google software in 2015 after the Blackberry 10 system failed on the market. Because the in-house Android smartphones were also unsuccessful, Blackberry licensed the brand name to the mobile phone manufacturer TCL. In the meantime, TCL no longer builds Blackberry telephones either, but the Texan company OnwardMobility wants to reanimate the name with a new device.
Five years ago, the company announced that it would stop developing smartphones.
Back then, the Blackberrys, which were still valued by a small fan community, were not to disappear entirely from the market.
Rather, the electronics group TCL Communication took over the production of the smartphones, whose market share in 2016 was only 0.1 percent.
It has continued to decline since then.
Blackberry has long only been listed under "Other" in smartphone statistics.
muk / dpa