How insane is it that just 5 years ago, Blackberries were the biggest sellers in Nigeria’s phone market and the ultimate status symbol? That sound the phones made when a message came into the phone’s instant messaging service (exclusive to Blackberry phones at the time) was all you needed to tell people that you were part of the cool kids.
The Blackberry effect was so powerful that it inspired countless songs and a movie franchise I have decided to call the Blackberry Babes Cinematic Universe™ or BBCU™.
The blackberry era may be gone (forever?) but we’ll always have the memories of the things that made the phones special. Things like:
- Their emojis that looked like crack heads.
BBM’s emojis looked like WhatsApp’s emojis that had been ravaged by years of crystal meth and cocaine use. It’s probably because they were in 2D but that doesn’t matter now because I’m intent on making fun of them. That being said, they did have some cute emojis though. The “talk to the hands” and “I don’t know” ones get special mentions.
2. Changing Display Pictures.
Remember when someone using your picture as their dp on your birthday was the highest of honours? And BBM had a notifications page for every user update too, so you would scroll down your notifications page looking at people who put you on their statuses and swearing revenge on those who didn’t.
Jesus Christ.
3. Timed Messages
Long before Snapchat, BBM came with an update of timed messages, where you could send people stuff and a couple of seconds after they read/saw it, it’d disappear.
This feature was great for unsolicited genital pictures to people you weren’t sure wouldn’t freak out and expose you.
4. The “Show everyone what you’re listening to” feature.
BBM had a feature where your contacts would get notifications about whatever song you were listening to on your phone’s music player. However, this feature did stuff it wasn’t supposed to by also revealing videos being watched, which was terrible for people who were avid watchers of the ancient art form known as pornography.
5. PINGING
How annoying was it when you were intentionally ignoring someone’s messages and they just kept on PINGING over and over again until it felt like you had a small vibrating sex toy in your pocket?
The worst.
6. The fucking tiny keys.
WHY WERE BLACKBERRY KEYS SO FUCKING TINY?! If I didn’t know better, I’d swear they were waging a war on people with fat fingers. Like, na fat my finger fat, I no kill person.
7. Their annoying scrolling mechanism.
Whether it was the trackball (which was doomed to stop working 3 months in) or the trackpad (which would either became way too sensitive or just stop responding to touch all together), Blackberry makers were out to make you contemplate suicide with their scrolling functions.
8. Channels.
BBM channels were tentacle-like extensions of Nigerian Facebook groups in the sense that you’d join a channel that advertises as a community for people that like jokes and then after you join, you start getting notifications along the lines of, “HORNY YOUNG GRANDMOTHERS ARE LOOKING FOR SUGAR NEPHEWS TO SMOTHER!”
9. Screen Muncher
Long before phones came with their own way to take screenshots, some maniac built a screenshot app for Blackberry and tried to get people to buy a full version by leaving a watermark on every screenshot taken with the trial version. It was named screen muncher and the sound effect for screenshots was the sound of someone biting into something.
It was so gross.
10. The amount of time it took to load!
Blackberry phones took a longer time to load than an old laptop loaded with 80 viruses and the windows vista operating system. It made no sense and I’m convinced they did this to mess with us.
