Tech Tonic | Why do we still crave a BlackBerry phone?

For many years, I’ve approached the annual CES viewing with more than a hint of pessimism. It used to be the show floor for a lot of concepts, exaggeration and very little that actually changed how we interacted with personal technology. This year, as I summarise the important announcements, a trend becomes clear, one that attempts to retrain focus on consumers and interactions. Be that as it may, the one that’ll likely have the most lasting impact on perception, choice and general direction is the British tech company Clicks giving the world at first glimpse at something called the Clicks Communicator. All of a sudden, some of us (beyond a certain age and maturity threshold, mind you) are immediately reminded of the good old days of BlackBerry phones.

The Clicks Communicator takes us back to a time when the thumbs knew where each key lived in that three-dimensional space. (Official image)

But, and this got me thinking, why do we still fondly remember BlackBerry phones at a time when the current crop of Android phones and indeed the Apple iPhone generations, are more powerful than the computing devices we use for work every day, are better than dedicated cameras more often than not, and are also becoming artificial intelligence (AI) devices all rolled into one? I suspect each would have their own list of reasons in different order, but the ingredients will be these — the experience of a physical QWERTY keyboard, the security proposition that was much before data privacy became cool, and the focused approach to communication with everything else secondary.

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I still remember the BlackBerry Passport, and before that the BlackBerry Classic, the Q10, the Bold Touch 9900, the Q5, and I can go as far back as the 2011 edition BlackBerry Curve 9370. Mind you, my profession had meant extensive exposure to almost the entire crop of touchscreen phones that had been flooding the market for almost two years by that point, all following the first iPhone (and everyone claimed to be an “iPhone beater”). Yet, the fundamental advantage of a physical keyboard always superseded everything else to decide my primary phone. A physical keyboard provides haptic feedback, proprioceptive awareness, and the ability to type without looking at your hands. On a BlackBerry, I could compose an entire message while walking, and only occasionally glancing at the phone.

The thumbs knew where each key lived in that three-dimensional space. This wasn’t just about speed (though BlackBerry users routinely outpaced touchscreen typists) it was about the cognitive load required for the task. The BlackBerry, or any physical QWERTY keyboard for that matter, didn’t presume to know what you meant. It was an instrument, not an interpreter. There’s something deeply appealing about a device that simply translates intention into text without intervention — unfortunately, that simplicity and focus may be a relic of an era gone by.

Think about this — when you type on glass, a portion of your attention must always remain visual. You’re constantly verifying, correcting, backspacing. Autocorrect was meant to solve a problem but instead created a new dependency, turning typing into a negotiation with an algorithm that thinks it knows better than you. How many times have you written a message only to realise autocorrect has replaced the previous word with something similar sounding, but with a completely different meaning? There is no count of the mental energy we collectively expend, simply writing every message we send.

In case you’re still wondering, let me summarise this for you — the BlackBerry era as we recollect fondly now, represented a different philosophy of mobile telephony hardware. The BlackBerry was purpose-built for communication and productivity. Being a camera, a gaming console, the host of social media brain-rot, and everything else, came secondary.

I have a sneaky suspicion the form factor of phones with physical keyboards enforced a discipline of usage — you checked messages or emails, responded to them, perhaps browsed a website or two, checked social media feeds quickly, and then kept the phone aside. I feel the keyboard enforced that discipline, because scrolling mindlessly, wasn’t in that device’s personality.

Contrast this with the modern smartphone. It is somehow explicitly engineered to maximise engagement and on-screen time (isn’t that the metric almost every website and web platform are designed to work with?). Every element of the interface, be it the infinite scroll on social media, the pull-to-refresh to instantly get updates, those unignorable notification badges, everything on the smartphone you and I use now has been smartly designed to keep us engrossed, keep us tapping and scrolling. The pitch is, we have the world’s intelligence and information on our fingertips instantly. No calculations as to how many hours we have lost robotically navigating these algorithmic caves.

I have hope from the $399 Clicks Communicator. Amid the AI and powerful chips conversation (and yes, its foundation too is with Android), this may prove to be something quietly radical. Perhaps a call to us, that we need to re-prioritise what we optimise in our lives. Perhaps what we need isn’t more screen real estate, more processing power, or more AI features, but rather a device that respects the value of focused work. As my father often remarks, technology should work for us, we shouldn’t be slaves to technology. Many of us get this. But the younger audience? It is still a few years before they understand perceived limitation is actual liberation. They very likely have no clue what I’m on about, this week.

Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.