GOODBYE BLACKBERRY WAY [350]

Formerly named Research In Motion (RIM), BlackBerry Limited is a Canadian company involved in cybersecurity software and services, numbering businesses and governments among its clients. I only say this to dispel the image of BlackBerry as the smartphone originator that went down in a shrieking ball of flames, outpaced by Apple and Samsung, which devoured both its consumer and business customer base. It would be like labelling IBM a failure for selling its personal computer business to Lenovo in 2005, as they moved to concentrate on cloud computing.

However, BlackBerry did suffer a number of issues that ultimately decided the future direction of the company, coalescing around the release of one phone in January 2013, the Z10. I owned one of these, and despite having owning four iPhones since then, I still think of the Z10 as being a good phone, even still an ideal one in many respects.

My previous two phones were also BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?), a purple Curve 8520 followed by a black Curve 9320. Originally bought because its tiny QWERTY keyboards made sending text messages earlier, these palm-sized devices invented the modern smartphone, shifting me from pay-as-you-go phone calls to stay in touch, to monthly data contracts and productivity on the go, backed by the encryption of BlackBerry’s operating system and messenger software.

The Z10 changed this form factor. Competing at the time with the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and the upcoming aluminium HTC One, the Z10 jettisoned the keyboard and navigation buttons, and the touch-sensitive navigation pad that replaced an earlier click wheel, bringing in a touch-sensitive screen – for people who needed the original set-up, the BlackBerry Q10 retained a QWERTY keyboard.

The Z10 lacked even a home button, still found on the other three phones, instead using gesture controls like moving a finger up the screen to come out of an app, or up and right to enter the BlackBerry Hub, which collected e-mails, texts and notifications into one place. The virtual keyboard introduced predictive typing, based on what I entered previously, a first for the time. While plastic in construction, the Z10 felt heavy and robust, surviving many drops, and the battery was replaceable, something I now rue when I consider if my current iPhone needs a new battery.

BlackBerry Curve 8520

As intuitive as the Z10’s operating system was, it was plagued by delays and superficially didn’t look too different from Android or Apple’s iOS, especially when those systems were updated, and when app developers moved to concentrate on them instead – I don’t remember downloading many apps on my Z10, having made icons on the home screen that linked to the web browser instead. By the nature of its form factor, the Z10 itself looked like a standard smartphone, and not like a BlackBerry. It also had an odd advertising launch, its SuperBowl ad in 2013 featuring a user of the phone bursting into flames, growing elephant legs, disappearing into a puff of smoke, and turning a crashing petrol tanker into a wave of rubber ducks: “in thirty seconds, it’s quicker to show you what it can’t do,” but the glimpses there were pass too quickly to register.

With Apple and Android phones becoming more attractive propositions in 2013, more people making the switch to smartphones chose these over BlackBerry, the cybersecurity layer of their apps also being matched. By the end of 2013, the company’s leadership had changed, and begun restructuring. The first BlackBerry phone that ran Android instead of their own system was released in 2015, and moved to license their manufacture to outside companies from 2016 – as of 2022, no new BlackBerry phones are being made.

I replaced my Z10 with a new iPhone 6 in 2014, my support for BlackBerry not having wavered despite a massive outage of their servers in 2011 that disabled its services for a number of days. However, their best phone at the time was the Passport, a passport-shaped phone with QWERTY keyboard too wide for me to use with one hand. In hindsight, it was a bad choice at that moment – iOS had only just added predictive text to the keyboard, but the iPhone’s main processor was slightly slower, it had only 1 GB RAM instead of the Z10’s 2GB, the home button was a step backwards from the Z10’s gesture controls, and I could no longer replace the battery. At least the iPhone still had a headphone jack.

BlackBerry Passport

WITH SO MANY LIGHT YEARS TO GO, AND THINGS TO BE FOUND [177]

On 30^th May 2016, I published the first article of “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” and while I have largely kept to the “nostalgia culture crisis” theme, I have been impressed by ability to lurch from one subject to the next.

The plan has always been to plug the gaps in my own knowledge, report my findings, and improve my writing ability. I just wasn’t expecting culture wars, Brexit and Donald Trump to flare up at the same time – hell, David Cameron was still Prime Minister when this site began. If you have dropped in along the way, wondered where this was all going next, and took a second look, you have my thanks.

For the first time, I present the top ten most read articles from the first three years and 176 articles – it turns out one trademark of this site is my ability to lurch from one subject to the next!

1. THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPEECH, BUT NOBODY’S LISTENING [link] (published 21/09/2017)

As “Dada” is an art form that needed its own word to reject one way of seeing the world, I needed a word for when “alt-right” people call themselves “performance artists” – the random word turned out to be “jackanapes.”

2. JUST A DREAM AND THE WIND TO CARRY ME [link] (published 05/10/2017)

The story of the ocean liner SS America, later to take “Ten Pound Poms” to Canberra as the cruise ship Australis, and ultimately shipwrecked over Fuerteventura – more famous as a wreck than it could have hoped as a floating hotel.

3. NOR ANY DROP TO DRINK [link] (published 25/02/2018)

I received a free packet of water with a magazine - I later discovered micellar water works just like washing-up liquid. The French knew what they were doing all along.

4. WHAT THE WORLD WANTS TODAY IS THE REAL THING [link] (published 18/02/2018)

Coca-Cola once advertised itself with a woman in a beach suit, and the word “yes” – perhaps they should have put speech marks around it, like I just have.

5. I’VE GOT PAC-MAN FEVER [link] (published 25/06/2018)

My review of the Nintendo NES Classic Mini, having never owned or played the original - the Sega Master System was more popular in the UK than the NES.

6. TRUE BLUE, BABY I LOVE YOU [link] (published 26/03/2018)

With British passports to change from red to blue covers following Brexit, the contract to make them went to a French-Dutch company, causing the “Daily Mail” to implode with jingoistic bile. The paper has since found a new editor.

7. THERE’S A MAGICAL PLACE, WE’RE ON OUR WAY THERE [link] (published 02/04/2018)

The rise of the “dead mall,” when closing stores create nostalgia for the big, empty spaces left behind. It comes with vaporwave, its own electronic, alienating soundtrack.  

8. WHO SAYS A MISS WAS MADE TO KISS? [link] (published 21/11/2016)

I’ll just leave this here: “Donald Trump will be President of the United States from 20th January 2017, and the weight of that office demands respect. However, the holder of that office cannot afford to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when Trump has never appeared to need it before. He will be given the opportunity to govern in the way he sees fit, but he will be under constant scrutiny, for every single decision, for every public utterance, for the rest of his life...”

9. I AIN’T GONNA STAND FOR IT [link] (published 05/08/2016)

“Ain’t” is a real word, appeared from two different places, and can be written down - Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell did not sing “There Is No Mountain High Enough.”

10. WATCH OUT, BEADLE’S ABOUT [link] (published 11/11/2016)

A portrait of Jeremy Beadle - fact collector, writer, broadcaster, concert promoter, charity fundraiser - through a series of “did you know” facts. I am sure he would have approved.

TRUE BLUE, BABY I LOVE YOU [102]

For me, the easiest way to start is by recounting the story: last week, the French-Dutch company Gemalto, a digital security company that also manufactures mobile SIM cards and biometric scanners, emerged as the winner of a blind auction held by the UK Government for the contract to produce passports for ten years from 2019. The new passports will be blue in colour, but this turned out to be the least interesting part of the story. Gemalto will replace De La Rue, the British makers of banknotes and stamps, who themselves won the contract in 2009 from 3M Security Printing and Scanning, although the originators of Scotch tape and Post-it notes are no longer in this line of work.

Back to today: the “Daily Mail” newspaper, having fallen out of its bath chair upon hearing that a foreign company – a French-ish one, no less – may be awarded the contract to produce a symbol of British nationality, has received over 120,000 signatures to a petition demanding that the makers of British passports must remain British, regardless of the fact an American company has done it before. The argument forced by the “Mail” includes how Gemalto are to be bought by the French defence company Thales, which is partly owned by the French state, and that the company had apparently been subjected to hacking raids in 2010 and 2011 from the US National Security Agency, and from its British equivalent, GCHQ, that were aimed at stealing the encryption keys that could unlock the security settings in SIM cards, of which Gemalto is the world’s biggest producer.

I used my hundredth article to point out how the circulation of the “Mail” is falling, and I wish this story had broken then, for it clearly explains why the eventual demise of this newspaper will not be mourned. As the “Mail” pointed out, the information on the hacking raids came from documents released by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who had been working as a contractor for the NSA. In October 2013, when another newspaper, “The Guardian,” published information on what Snowden had leaked, the “Mail” labelled it, “a paper that helps Britain’s enemies,” that would put lies in danger. Another newspaper, “The Independent,” also spoke at the time about choosing not to publish leaked data that would have proved sensitive. I can only guess that, due to time having passed, any leaked information that now helps prove your point is now fair game.

Then, there is headline for the “Mail’s” comment piece, published in last Friday’s issue: “Today the Mail has a question for Britain’s ruling class: Why DO you hate our country, its history, culture, and the people’s sense of identity?” It is an extraordinary screed of bile and phlegm, which includes this magical passage: “As the EU pillaged our sovereignty, it also decimated the symbols of our sovereignty. Weights and measures went the same way as the passport.” Those metric bastards! The piece also references how, “while Remainers predictably sneered,” the new passport was announced to be blue in colour, for the first time since 1988, a symbolic shift from the burgundy colour adopted since 1988, when the UK voluntarily standardised its passport colour with the rest of the European Union – as someone who has only ever had a burgundy passport, this means absolutely nothing, but for others, especially the “Mail”, the symbolism of a return to something imperial means the entire world to them.

I thought the blue cover of the new passports was going to be my main point of conversation, a symbol of longing for a time that exists only in memory, as people only tend to remember the good things about the past – using the colour of a book to indicate a distinct national identity being one such thing, rather than hailing the less sexy fact that British citizens can access more visa-free travel than anyone else on Earth.

Instead, I am stuck talking about awarding government contracts. The prevailing argument since the news broke over Gemalto, propagated by the “Mail,” is that despite the award being the result of the free-market economics of which you imagine the “Mail” would be in favour, money should not have been the major thought, even if the Government could save up to £120 million. While De La Rue could lose jobs, Gemalto will create jobs, particularly at its offices in Fareham, not far from where I live. However, even if Gemalto proves it is secure in its management of data, just as De La Rue and 3M did, the simple fact that allowing a non-British company to deal with British biometric data is being considered as treasonous, giving a British national newspaper another chance to be xenophobic about those bloody foreigners again: page 7 of last Friday’s “Mail” carried a teaser for a later story, marked as “Mass walkouts cripple France – quelle surprise!” It’s almost like the French right to strike is part of their national identity or something.