BlackBerry is quitting the phone business—again. You might recall BlackBerry quit manufacturing smartphones back in 2016, but it licensed its brand name to the Chinese smartphone corporation TCL. TCL started pumping out BlackBerry-branded devices—some of which were QWERTY equipped and some of which were shameless rebadgings of existing TCL phones. TCL’s Zombie BlackBerry plan apparently wasn’t working too well, though, since now that’s dead, too.
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Today, BlackBerry Mobile posted what amounts to an amicable breakup note on Twitter, saying that TCL’s license to the BlackBerry brand would expire August 31, 2020, at which point the two companies would go their separate ways. Once the agreement expires, TCL will have “no further rights to design, manufacture, or sell any new BlackBerry mobile devices,” though the company would still be on the hook for supporting existing devices until August 31, 2022. With no other manufacturers lined up, it sounds like BlackBerry-branded phones will be dead for good.
We’ve seen many smartphone brands slowly die out over the years, but the expiration of a license sounds like it’s going to lead to the unique situation of a clean, decisive execution. What happens if there are leftover TCL BlackBerry phones? Do they get buried in the desert?
BlackBerry—back when the company was called Research in Motion—was a mobile powerhouse in the early 2000s. The compan