OnwardMobility has announced it is going down.
Indeed, the rumours were genuine. As if the company’s silence wasn’t a warning indication of more serious issues, OnwardMobility has now closed its doors and abandoned its intentions to produce a 5G BlackBerry handset.
On Tuesday, the firm made the announcement on its website:
The announcement that OnwardMobility is closing down and that we will no longer be developing an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard comes with tremendous grief.
“This wasn’t the result we worked and hoped for,” says the OnwardMobility team.
Insights: The BlackBerry intentions of OnwardMobility withered away on the vine
Almost two years after the Texas-based business obtained the BlackBerry brand name and declared ambitions to produce a secure, 5G BlackBerry smartphone, the dismal BlackBerry news has emerged. They also promised to provide an actual keyboard. In our assessment, there are no physical QWERTY keyboards on any 5G phones.
OnwardMobility failing may be the last nail in the coffin for BlackBerry’s whole product and service line. BlackBerry (the Canadian firm) auctioned off the majority of its most important patents earlier this year. The BlackBerry OS service that supported the first BlackBerry phones was then discontinued (before the Android versions, which were built by yet a different partner).
One of the most essential and forward-looking mobile brands in history has come to an end. Blackberry was certainly taken off guard when the first iPhone appeared in 2007. In contrast, BlackBerry phones had been the most significant mobile brand in both the corporate and consumer markets until that point in time To think that in 2005, having a BlackBerry phone was seen as a status symbol is incredible.
In 2015, when BlackBerry made its Android debut, the company and its physical keyboard were considered as a novelty.
Our communal memory of BlackBerry phones as “CrackBerries” will fade away as the brand name fades into the background.