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Maxime Morin, a 35-year-old marketer in Quebec, first started tinkering with his phone out of curiosity. What was this device, a BlackBerry Torch with a sliding screen and full physical keyboard, capable of? How did its mechanical parts fit together and work? There was a lot to explore within this handheld gadget.
And then, of course, it broke.
There weren’t many good online tutorials about how to fix the thing, which first came out more than a decade ago. Morin bought a working Torch for comparison and toyed around with both devices until he figured out what was wrong with his broken one.
So began an obsession. Morin started to collect BlackBerries: the Torch, Bold, Tour, Curve, Q5, Passport, and Q10, an entire family of clicky keyboard smartphones. He would remove components from his devices to figure out what they were for, gradually learning how to switch out different parts to customize and upgrade them.
The world moved on to slender glass phones with flat panels and as few mechanical parts as possible, but he never did. BlackBerry devices felt endlessly fixable to Morin, who has come to support the Right to Repair movement, which dictates that consumers should have total control over their technology. Companies like Apple have locked down their products with proprietary parts and software that grant access only to authorized vendors. These old BlackBerry phones seemed to deliver on a different promise.
“They led me to this policy: Buy if you can repair only,” Morin says.
Of course, nothing is quite so simple in the world of apps, social networks, and operating systems. The old BlackBerry operating system, BB10, is several years old. The brand has been licensed out to manufacturers that attach it to Android devices. There’s no such thing as an official, modern BlackBerry in the classic mold.
Emphasis on official. There are still BlackBerry loyalists like Morin who value what the brand once stood for, who resurrect classic devices and bask in the glow of their glory days. CrackBerry, for instance, is an active forum where BlackBerry users can figure out what these devices still do natively and how to fill in the gaps with hacks and other workarounds.
Jordan Reiner, a 25-year-old information technology services tutor in Buffalo, New York, mainly tinkers with the BlackBerry Classic and has played around with the Passport and Bold. He says he just wanted a phone for Google Maps, internet browsing, Spotify, the camera, texting, calling, and email. He calls anything else a distraction or waste of time.
Reiner doesn’t use an Android-based BlackBerry device, so there’s no hope of updating the operating system or sideloading apps. He doesn’t care: He can use the browser on his Classic and set bookmarks for whatever services he needs. It’s a less distracting experience relative to modern smartphones, he says.
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“I think it helps to take a step back for some people and really think about why you ‘need’ a smartphone,” Reiner says. “There’s a small craze going on nowadays where people are trying to buy dumbphones [or] flip phones so they can break free from phone addiction.” He cited the Nokia 3310, Palm Phone, and Light Phone 2 as examples. The Palm Phone can still pack all the distractions, but it’s too small to get overly absorbed in, while the Light Phone can only call, text, set alarms, calculate, and play music and podcasts.
Reiner says most basic phones don’t afford him the option to write an email on the go or sideload apps, and the T9 keyboard on a flip phone is a pain to use. His BlackBerry Classic keyboard lets him quickly type an email and has a few functioning apps, though it’s not so speedy that he can get addicted to them.
Emily, a 25-year-old researcher in the United States who asked not to use her last name for privacy reasons, also tinkers with a Classic. She says she doesn’t want to buy new devices just to keep up with updated software, and she’s come to view the two smartphone giants, Apple and Google, as “very stingy and monopolistic.” Emily was able to sideload a few apps onto her Classic — Google Maps, Memrise, and Skype — and upload a custom ringtone.
“When you think about apps, you think it’s going to be available regardless [of operating system], right?” Emily says. “Especially as smartphones were really exploding in popularity, we expected to have access to them and didn’t think about the providers trying to restrict which ones you could use based on the store or device you used… Since I was on a device that wasn’t Google or Apple, I ended up having very limited access to apps that I’d fully expected to be able to use.”
Florin Voicu, a 36-year-old in Romania, initially picked up a BlackBerry Classic for his mom because she was accustomed to a QWERTY keypad. It was easy to find an affordable one online since the platform was no longer current. When his mom stopped using it, Voicu found it useful for his day job as a technical incident analyst for a major bank’s mobile app. He would test the app on the phone, which runs an outdated version of Android with a nonstandard screen resolution, “helping quite a few people with some bugs they had been experiencing after being left behind by recent app developments.”
(Blackberry OS 10 has a compatibility layer for Android apps, so Voicu was able to get certain Android 4.3 apps working on the Classic, though they had a “weird square-screen aspect ratio.”)
Voicu also likes the build of the Classic in contrast to what he calls the “glass sandwich” design of other popular smartphones. That makes for a less fragile phone and lets consumers get into the guts of the device, a risky process for phones with everything soldered to the board — a design that effectively prevents someone without the right tools or expertise from repairing their own phone.
Ron, a 33-year-old from Israel who declined to share his last name for privacy reasons, has also taken advantage of this open and malleable design to fix his various BlackBerry devices. “It looks like a rugged Lego,” he says. “Seems to be really easy to replace defected parts with new.” He’s opened his Classic to fix the camera (“I had to push it a bit”), he opened his Bold to solder the SIM card that he mistakenly broke, and he plans on replacing both his Priv cover and KEYone keyboard.
Ron says he replaced a lot of parts in his old 2008 MacBook, but the new models solder all the parts to the board, making home repair nearly impossible. Back then, he says, the ethos around technology afforded consumers a lot more freedom: If you bought it, it’s yours, and you can modify it as you’d like.
“Today’s manifesto is like, if you’re on a budget, you’ll buy a midrange fragile phone, and when it breaks, you won’t be able to fix it, so you’ll buy a better one next time while thinking it will be less fragile,” Ron says, but if you buy the expensive model and it breaks, it’s impossible to easily fix with some original parts. Only a lab can do it, he says, “but it’s too goddam expensive.”
“When I tried to replace my brother’s iPhone screen, it was really like bootcamp for me,” Ron says.
At the end of the day, people don’t gravitate toward old BlackBerry devices because they want a phone that can do everything — quite the opposite. They are largely minimalists who want to experience the actual physical world with a few assists from their mobile device and without the increasing limitations monopolistic companies have created for those who don’t subscribe to their physical and digital walled gardens. They want the freedom to strip down or cherry-pick their apps, replace a broken part, and not have to buy a shiny new gadget every product cycle.
Also, they really love QWERTY.
“What can I say — I just love the keyboard,” Ron says. “I feel like an idiot when I tap a glass screen.”