Blackberry to pull the plug on legacy business phones

Jan 4, Reuters -- BlackBerry Ltd is pulling the plug on service for its once ubiquitous business phones, which were toted in the early 2000s by executives, politicians and legions of fans.

The phones, which sported a tiny QWERTY physical keyboard, pioneered push email and the BBM instant messaging service.

In 2016, former U.S. President Barack Obama, one of its most celebrated users, made headlines when he was asked to give up his BlackBerry and replace it with an unnamed smartphone.

Blackberry lost favor with users with the advent of Apple's touchscreen iPhones and rival Android devices. In the past few years, the company has focused on making cybersecurity software and embedded operating systems for cars.

There was a lot of tributes on social media. One Twitter user reminisced it was a fabulous machine https: bit.ly 3 G 0 DCj 2 and hoped the company's phones would be resurrected.

In a document released in 2020, the company said that it would take steps to decommission legacy services for BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS operating systems, and that devices running on them would no longer be supported, make phone calls or send messages reliably.

A U.S. judge rejected the company's plan to dismiss a lawsuit that claimed it defrauded shareholders by inflating the success and profitability of smartphones using BlackBerry 10 OS, and said the class-action case could go to trial this fall.