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BlackBerry officially killed off BlackBerry Classic smartphone

BlackBerry has announced it will no longer manufacture the BlackBerry Classic smartphone, running on the BB10 operating system.

“To keep innovating and advancing our portfolio, we are updating our smartphone lineup with state of the art devices,” announced Ralph Pini, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager for Devices, in a blog post. “As part of this, and after many successful years in the market, we will no longer manufacture BlackBerry Classic.”

The decision to cease production of the Classic all but removes the physical keyboard from its smartphone lineup that users have loved.

The move comes about a week after it was revealed that the company will be working on three more Android-powered smartphones. That falls under the company’s statement of ‘state of the art devices’ but its first Android phone (the Priv) hasn’t exactly wowed the market.

The company is surely slowing killing off its BB10 products in favour of the Android operating system, but it said that it is still committed to the proprietary OS.

“We continue to actively support BlackBerry 10 with software updates and are on track to deliver version 10.3.3 next month with a second update to follow next year,” Pini said.

It might be changing its strategy across the world, but in South Africa the phone maker has been as successful as ever.

While it is well behind Samsung in terms of market share, Blackberry still has 13 percent of the South Africa’s smartphone market share, while Apple is still lagging behind the big players with six percent. Sony, LG and HTC are bringing up the rear sitting at five, two and one percent respectively.

Back in 2015, we reviewed the BlackBerry Classic with Michael Reed giving it a score of 8.2. He wrote: “BlackBerry might not be the king of the hill any more but it’s important to remember that the President of the US still uses a BlackBerry, so that’s something to consider.”

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