Wanna feel old? Your old Blackberry is now the subject of a nostalgic movie
“Want to feel old…?” has become a tired meme – but seriously, want to feel old? Blackberry, the world’s first smartphone and once the biggest company in Canada, is now such a nostalgic legacy product that it’s the subject of a movie being released later this year.
In a former life as a tech reporter I was once interviewed on Sky News during the then-infamous Blackberry outage of 2011, which saw services for users across the world go dark for three whole days. The company was already way past its early 2000s heyday and the presenter asked if this could be the end of the line. “Not yet,” I said. “But it’s another brick in the wall.”
That wall came closer to completion last year when the company decommissioned its email and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) services, as well as a raft of other features. It’s not quite dead yet – although it lost more than a billion dollars last year – but it feels like a company on end of life support.
This could hardly be more strongly underlined than by a film, Blackberry, focusing on “The ‘true story’ of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.”
Following hot on the heels of movies including Tetris and The Beanie Bubble, it’s designed to punch people in their 40s right in the nostalgia glands. Few people that age (my age) will have made it through their 20s without owning a Blackberry, once the world’s coolest communications device, and one whose legacy is still visible today in services like Apple’s Messages software.
It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time, Blackberry was genuinely cool. In the early 2000s it was the early adopter’s device of choice, with its revolutionary email capability, its full keyboard (!) and that distinctive rollerball that would clog up if you looked at it funny. Apple ate its lunch with the first iPhone (2007) but Blackberry had a resurgence in the 2010s when it became an unlikely figurehead for resistance, with BBM offering end-to-end encryption that allowed users to organise protests without the risk of their messages being intercepted.
But the rot had already set in – the most remarkable thing is that Blackberry still exists in any form at all today. Apart from a nostalgic movie, that is: that much was inevitable.
- Blackberry, starring Matt Johnson and Jay Baruchel is out on 6 October