BlackBerry Is Done Making Phones Forever And Everyone's Paying Their Respects

The fruitful days for BlackBerry are officially over.

The company announced this week it will no longer make its own phones. Instead, it will focus on the other side of its business: Creating software and providing mobile security, both of which are profitable ventures for BlackBerry.

Who knew?

Anyway, BlackBerry CEO John Chen elaborated on the company's decision, saying in a statement,

The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners. We are reaching an inflection point with our strategy. Our financial foundation is strong, and our pivot to software is taking hold.

And while BlackBerry will indeed outsource the making of its phones to other companies, it's pretty much done spending energy trying to make its own phones better than anyone else's. So since that's the case, there's only one thing left to do: Pay our respects.

*Clears throat.*

Oh, Blackberry, how we will miss thee. You will always be remembered as the best of the keyboard generation of phones.

With you, there was no missing emails and it was easy to do parts of our homework on your device.

Though its reign was short, BBM remains the only instant messenger to feature an emoticon that adequately simulated an e-hug. Plus, adding someone by pin number was never not cool.

You were the last phone that was acceptable to be carried by belt clip.

Even when the iPhone came out, you valiantly stuck around for a good number of years. But it was all over once Instagram and other mobile apps came out that you just couldn't keep up with. At that point, there was no reason for any of us to keep both of you around.

Well, most of us.

And now, we mourn with the rest of the internet.

You will be missed.

Citations: The Verge