02-05-2020, 09:29 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/30567...rry-phones
Quote:BlackBerry has struggled to find a place in the modern smartphone era, and it turned to TCL to do the heavy lifting a few years ago. TCL has manufactured devices like the KEYone and KEY2 under the BlackBerry brand, but there won’t be any more BlackBerry phones from TCL. The company just announced that its licensing agreement ends on August 31, 2020.
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Most of the BlackBerry devices from TCL had a physical keyboard with those perfectly beveled keys that made BlackBerry devices so desirable in the past. However, that came with a smaller display and a somewhat more awkward form factor for watching videos and taking photos. People have become accustomed to larger screens, and on-screen keyboards have gotten surprisingly capable with features like text prediction and swipe input. Thumb-typing with physical keys used to be the gold standard for mobile text entry, but now it’s slower than on-screen methods. Without the keyboard as a selling point, there may not be a place for BlackBerry phones.