4 of the strangest Blackberry devices ever made

There was a time when BlackBerry was the hottest phone brand, when QWERTY keyboards were favored alongside or even instead of touchscreens – a trend that appears to be returning in 2026. BlackBerry still exists, but its phones are history, with the company ending support for its older devices in 2022. In 1999, parent company Research in Motion (RIM) released the BlackBerry 850, which functioned as a two-way pager that could also send and receive electronic mail. Its last phone hardware, the BlackBerry KEY2 LE, was launched in 2018. It has been manufactured under a licensing agreement with TCL since BlackBerry announced it would stop manufacturing hardware itself in 2016. The company shifted its business model exclusively to software, where it remains to this day.

At the height of its popularity, BlackBerry made some incredible devices, many of which, according to die-hard fans, are to this day better than any touchscreen phone you can buy today. Some of its most popular and well-reviewed phones included the BlackBerry Pearl, designed to appeal to mainstream customers, the BlackBerry Bold which had a sleek leatherette back and was in the hands of every business executive, and the BlackBerry Curve, an entry-level option. There have been several versions which have been hugely successful. But alongside these huge successes, BlackBerry has also had some hiccups, with some truly strange devices.

The BlackBerry Passport was launched in 2014 to try to capitalize on the growth of larger-screen phones, but it looked like a big block. It wasn’t comfortable to hold and didn’t fit in with other sleeker phones on the market at the time. It had a 4.5-inch HD display, BlackBerry’s iconic QWERTY keyboard, up to 30 hours of battery life, and a feature called BlackBerry Blend that made it easy to sync with your computer or tablet.

With LTE connectivity and BlackBerry Assistant (not AI-powered, of course), it was designed to be a productivity dream device. Still, it only had 32GB of storage and a microSD card slot to add up to just 128GB more (okay, that was decent back then). The cameras were rudimentary with only 13 MP for the rear and 2 MP for the front. You can still find BlackBerry Passports sold as collectibles. But you might be confused when you see it, wondering if it’s a phone, a small tablet, or something in between.

The BlackBerry Storm wasn’t so much strange as it was a major failure for the company which, at the time in 2008, was trying to compete with the sleek look of Apple’s touchscreen-only iPhone. The Storm was the brand’s first attempt at a touchscreen-only phone. This was a bold move considering it meant ditching the feature fans loved about BlackBerry, the physical QWERTY keyboard. This was confusing since the keyboard differentiated the BlackBerry and was the reason people were looking for it, so why remove it completely? As a result, the Storm came across as nothing more than a poor copycat attempt to keep up with the changing times.

Additionally, the virtual keyboard was not easy to use, with the integration of haptic feedback for button press confirmations proving uncomfortable for some. The phone also didn’t perform well in other aspects, with slow processing and lag, camera shutter lags, and suboptimal call quality. It was also riddled with bugs, which suggested that RIM had overstepped its bounds in trying to distract from its core. The BlackBerry Storm is widely considered one of the biggest disasters in smartphone history. The follow-up Storm 2 righted some of the wrongs, but it still wasn’t up to par with the iPhone.

As the tablet market heated up, BlackBerry launched the Playbook in 2011. But it fell into a strange space: It was too large to offer the portability of a phone, but too small to offer the benefits users expected from a tablet. Although it introduced RIM’s new tablet operating system, the mix of controls, small size, and the fact that you could only use some of the best features when pairing it with a BlackBerry phone limited its adoption.

Interestingly, today, smaller 7-inch tablets and e-readers with limited connectivity to mobile apps are available and very popular. So the Playbook could have simply been ahead of its time, putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. The world of apps had not yet exploded like it has today when it was introduced, which left it in a strange, aimless medium. Maybe the Playbook isn’t weird in general, but was simply unsuitable for its time.

Launched in 2015, the BlackBerry Priv was BlackBerry’s first attempt to release a phone based on the Android operating system, recognizing its dominance as the iPhone’s main competitor. It had a full-size touchscreen that slides up to reveal the QWERTY keyboard that fans didn’t want to part with. The best of both worlds! However, to fit it into a compact body, the keys were quite tight, making it difficult to compose readable sentences on the first try.

It was essentially a BlackBerry in name only, but an Android phone in software. Except it didn’t even work very well on Android. Call quality wasn’t great either, and the cameras were passable at best, even for the time. Overall, the BlackBerry Priv was a fairly bare-bones device compared to competing devices on the market at the time, like the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone 6s. Despite the fact that this and other devices did not turn out to be huge successes, which slightly tarnished the brand’s reputation, BlackBerry remains an icon in the field of mobile technology. Its iconic and revolutionary phones launched what eventually became the smartphone as we know it today. This wouldn’t have been possible without the best of the BlackBerry line, regardless of the worst.