Goodbye BlackBerry

Posted on March 2, 2018

Yesterday I finally shutdown my BlackBerry Q5 for the last time. The tiny phone had been acting up for weeks, reporting false battery levels and behaving poorly just before shutting down with more than half of its battery life remaining. It had become too unreliable.

The phone itself, though, had long since become a burden. The Q5 ran BlackBerry OS 10, a fantastic, quick mobile operating system that I liked well enough. While most features were similar to Android or iOS, the BlackBerry Hub was a great feature. All my emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook messages, and notifications would show up in a single, sensible list. Even this feature, though, began to lose its value once BlackBerry abandoned the OS. First Facebook was removed from the hub, though that's mostly Facebook's fault. I then had to remove the default Twitter app because BlackBerry never upgraded to the longer 240 message format, making the app highly annoying to use. It was down to just email and text messages in the end.

I realized I was effectively using the Q5 as a "shitty Android phone," relying more and more on Android apps for basic functionality, Twitter and podcasts to be specific. It was time to move on regardless of how much I enjoyed that keyboard.

My Q5 joins my two Windows phones (a WP7 device that I loved and a WP8 device that was unusable) in the pile of useless mobile devices. Come to think of it, I'd lump my terrible Maemo-powered Nokia n810 device in there; the Nokia Linux tablet was also a terrible device.