[traceroute66]

> Thanks for the explanation, though I think I still don't quite understand it

The underlying point is that the Blackberry was not your average smartphone.

Your average smartphone (assuming it is not carrier locked) can be used forever (although it would not be advisable to do so due to lack of security and OS updates).

The Blackberry was a wolf in sheep's clothing. It might just look like another smartphone, but it had heavy upstream dependencies:

     - Specific carrier contracts were required (i.e. similar to when the iPhone originally came out, although for a long time now you can use an iPhone with any 4G/5G SIM ... this is not the case with Blackberry).
     - If it was an enterprise model, you needed to be running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) somewhere (it would figure out how by first doing a phone-home to Blackberry HQ in Canada). If it couldn't talk to BES, it became an unusable brick.
     - If it was a consumer model, it needed to phone-home to Canada (Blackberry HQ where they ran a "cloud" servers). I can't remember if you needed an account in Canada, I suspect you did because I think that's how email worked (they would login to IMAP on your behalf and push the mails to you).

Basically it was a heavily push-orientated model, the phones themselves were fairly dumb out of the box.

So I guess the obvious implication here is that the Canada datacentre is going to be killed off. At the same time, many carriers have no doubt already been removing Blackberry plans for new customers already (and perhaps nudging existing customers off).

[rcarmo]

The 8000 series was a custom J2ME shell around a pretty basic set of services that were completely tied to the BES (enterprise server). They even had to be upgraded to work with "public", "unbound" e-mail accounts, which were all routed through RIM's services.

It was almost a thin client, really.

[amaccuish]

I actually miss the architecture. Although the centralisation had its problems, the efficiency was fantastic. Everything was compressed, data was pushed instead of pulled, and with BES every device had an automatic always on VPN-like connection, like WireGuard. And now my phone has to deal with hanging TCP connections, IP address changes and ActiveSync just crapping out.

[thought_alarm]

Right, but that only applies to data and push functionality. It's still not clear why vanilla voice and SMS functionality would be affected.