BlackBerrys account for 3% of smartphones
TORONTO — Somewhat reluctantly, Athar Afzal finally gave up on BlackBerry earlier this year.
He was a longtime fan of the iconic Canadian phone brand but his company forced employees who weren’t already using iPhones to transition over. He was ready to make the change though, having grown fed up with the slowness of his aging BlackBerry Priv.
According to online measurement firm comScore, there aren’t many holdouts left in Canada still using a BlackBerry.
BlackBerrys accounted for only three per cent of the smartphones used in Canada at the end of last year, says comScore.
A decade ago, the BlackBerry brand was at its peak — but about to experience a precipitous decline with the release of the first iPhone and the subsequent unveiling of the Google Android platform. In 2016, after years of failing to stem market share losses, BlackBerry announced a monumental change in strategy. The Waterloo company’s new focus would be on software and it would no longer make phones, although partnerships with other hardware makers kept the brand alive.
“They never kept up with the times,” Afzal lamented.
Piotr Makuch also gave up on his BlackBerry Priv recently and switched to an iPhone.
“I wouldn’t say I’m an absolute
diehard but I certainly appreciated a lot of the things that they do and I’ve always enjoyed my BlackBerry devices,” he said. “I’d never had an iPhone before and I appreciate that for all the limitations in terms of its customizability, with anything I run everything just works smoothly and nicely. And that’s a nice change from the Priv which would kind
of chug when I tried to launch apps sometimes.”
Last year, Chinese company TCL released the KeyOne, which had the trademark BlackBerry keyboard, and it’s set to unveil the Key2 next month. An ad promotes the phone with the tag line “an icon reborn.” TCL is one of the companies BlackBerry licensed its brand to.