Another bad day ahead for BlackBerry enthusiasts. OnwardMobility, which owns the Blackberry brand, has confirmed that its plans for a new 5G-capable BlackBerry-branded smartphone are indeed dead and buried. The news comes shortly after BlackBerry finally discontinued its mobile OS, putting an end to the story of its BlackBerry devices being made before the brand switched to the Android operating system.
In recent years, if the BlackBerry brand was well affixed to Android smartphones, it was under the leadership of manufacturers other than BlackBerry itself. The Canadian company originally sold the rights to manufacture BlackBerry smartphones to Chinese manufacturer TCL in 2016. The license was later purchased by OnwardMobility after TCL stopped using it and switched to its own branded hardware.
OnwardMobility had presented plans to produce a 5G-capable Android phone with a physical keyboard since acquiring the rights. Unfortunately, these will remain very much in draft form, as the company has announced on its website that it will be closing its doors. This advisory also included specific reference to the cancellation of the “ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard” in question. For what it’s worth, the Android-based BlackBerry models that have been released will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future.
Between that cancellation and BlackBerry’s $600 million sale of its mobile hardware patent portfolio, it seems any fantasy about the brand’s return to the smartphone arena is far-fetched more than ever. .
Source: ZDNet.com