New BlackBerry phones, as announced by Onward Mobility in 2020, are not coming out anymore. The upstart company behind the project is shutting down.
On its official website, Onward Mobility has announced its farewell:
We want to thank you all for the tremendous amount of support that you have given us since we first launched Onward Mobility. However, it is with great sadness that we announce that Onward Mobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard.
Apparently, this doesn’t come as a surprise to many as Crackberry—the top community for everything BlackBerry—has already announced this few weeks ago.
Now that Onward Mobility is dead, this only means that a smartphone with a physical keyboard is also dead, at least in the Philippines. As of this writing, the only phones you can buy locally with such feature are the old BlackBerry devices made by TCL.
Despite being one of the most popular mobile devices in the 2000s, BlackBerry didn’t survive the smartphone era. It even triggered the advent of smartphones starting with the Apple iPhone. However, it wasn’t a true smartphone—all touchscreen, no physical QWERTY keyboard.
