The move marks the end of an era as the phones, which sported a tiny QWERTY physical keyboard, pioneered push email and the BBM instant messaging service.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama, one of its most celebrated users, made headlines in 2016 when he was asked to give up his BlackBerry and replace it with an unnamed smartphone. Blackberry lost favor with users with the advent of Apple’s touchscreen iPhones and rival Android devices. In recent years, the company pivoted to making cybersecurity software and embedded operating systems for cars.it was a “fabulous machine” and hoped the company’s phones would be resurrected.
A U.S. judge on Monday rejected the company’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it defrauded shareholders by inflating the success and profitability of smartphones using BlackBerry 10 OS, and said the class-action case could go to trial this fall. —Reporting by Akash Sriram and Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty