The New BlackBerry Phone Is Apparently Dead Again

It's been a rollercoaster stretch of a couple of years for BlackBerry fans. In early 2020, TCL announced that it had lost the BlackBerry license and would therefore stop releasing phones under the brand. While many of us probably thought that was the end of BlackBerry, later on in 2020, OnwardMobility announced that it had acquired the license and planned to launch a 5G BlackBerry smartphone in 2021.

Much of 2021 passed without much acknowledgement of that project from OnwardMobility, but toward the middle of the year, we heard that the phone was still in the works. We wound up finishing 2021 with no 5G BlackBerry to speak of, and if you thought that was a sign of things to come, it seems you hit the nail right on the head. Now OnwardMobility has apparently lost the license to use the BlackBerry brand, which means the 5G BlackBerry is more than likely dead.

As reported by CrackBerry founder Kevin Michaluk and confirmed by the folks at Android Police, the BlackBerry 5G dream is dead. "Dead as of yesterday," Michaluk wrote in a post on the CrackBerry forums. "Time to move on CrackBerry fam. Confirmed from multiple sources."

This project was canceled before any of us got even a taste of the device. As Android Police notes, no images of the 5G BlackBerry have ever been shared – not even renders of what OnwardMobility expected the phone to look like. When it first announced the device, OnwardMobility said that it would be Android-based with a physical keyboard and that it would offer a suite of secure apps for business and security-minded users, so it certainly planned to check the boxes the BlackBerry faithful would expect.

Beyond that description, though, nothing about the phone itself ever materialized. It's hard to know how far along in development OnwardMobility was when BlackBerry canceled its license, and because of that, we don't know what the fate of the company will be. One of the possibilities Android Police presents is that OnwardMobility could try to salvage the development it's already put toward this phone and release it without BlackBerry branding, but without confirmation, the company's future is up in the air.

From these two reports, it seems that this is the end of the road for BlackBerry phones as well. In his post to the CrackBerry forums, Michaluk wonders if BlackBerry will make a formal statement about the phone's cancellation, adding, "my guess would be that John Chen/BlackBerry prefers they just go quietly away (he's clearly done with phones) and at this point its [sic] probably best for all of us to forgot [sic] about this train wreck."

Indeed, Android Police's report doesn't paint an optimistic picture, either, pointing out that BlackBerry sold off the rest of its mobile patents earlier in February. It sure seems like BlackBerry is done with the mobile world after this patent sell-off and walking back the licensing agreement it struck with OnwardMobility.

So, this could indeed be the end of BlackBerry-branded smartphones. BlackBerry used to be a behemoth in the mobile phone space, but the rise of Android and iOS saw its market share dwindle to a sliver of what it was at the brand's peak. Though we've seen a number of noteworthy BlackBerry devices launch in the years since then, the brand was never able to return to its former glory. If this truly is the end for BlackBerry, then it's going out with a whimper instead of a bang.