News

BlackBerry Has Officially Pulled The Plug On Older Devices

The company is pulling the plug because it has been focusing exclusively on delivering enterprise software and services to enterprises and governments.

Published

5 years ago

January 5, 2022

David Morelo

blackberry has officially pulled the plug on older devices

Long gone are the days when BlackBerry smartphones dominated the world of business with their characteristic QWERTY keyboards that made it possible for managers to bombard employees with text messages and emails at a much faster rate than phones with the old-school keypad allowed.

Now, older BlackBerry devices have turned from unused to unusable because the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions are no longer available from January 4, 2022.

“As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS, and 9-1-1 functionality” stated the company in their announcement.

The company is pulling the plug because it has been focusing exclusively on delivering enterprise software and services to enterprises and governments since it discontinued its BlackBerry line in 2016 and changed its name from Research In Motion (RIM) to BlackBerry Limited.

The last mobile phone operating system released by RIM is BlackBerry 10, which became available in 2013 and reached its last version (10.3.3.3216) on April 4, 2018. Since then, Chinese electronics giant TCL released several BlackBerry-branded phones, but their reception was lukewarm at best.

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In August 2020, the BlackBerry brand changed hands again when it was picked up by OnwardMobility, a US-based company in the mobile security space. The company announced a new BlackBerry 5G smartphone with a physical keyboard, but it has already missed the advertised release date of 2021 by a few days, and there’s no indication that the smartphone will hit the shelves any time soon.

Indeed, it’s possible that OnwardMobility has realized that the demand for a smartphone with a physical keyboard simply isn’t there anymore because most consumers have gotten used to typing on increasingly intelligent virtual keyboards on their 6-inch and larger smartphone displays.

News

Samsung And Spotify Offer Free Premium Deal In MENA

Nearly seven in ten streams in the region come from 18-to-34-year-olds — the audience Samsung is hoping to entice into its ecosystem.

Published

6 days ago

August 7, 2026

Nour Nasir

Samsung

Samsung has announced a partnership with Spotify spanning the Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye, bundling Spotify Premium with select devices across its ecosystem. The headline offer — up to four months of Premium for free — is a first for the region.

Customers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Türkiye who buy any OLED or 98-inch television, or any Galaxy S or Z series mobile device, get four months of Spotify Premium. The offer, tiered by market and device, is available at retail and on Samsung.com, and redeemed through the Samsung Promotion and Samsung Members apps.

For Samsung, the strategy is less about free music than about lock-in. The Korean tech giant’s pitch is continuity: a track starts on a Galaxy smartphone through Galaxy Buds on the commute, moves to a Samsung TV and soundbar in the living room, and stays controllable from a Galaxy Watch. The more seamlessly music travels between those devices, the harder it becomes to swap any one of them for a rival’s.

“Technology should bring people closer to the things they love, and few things connect people the way music does,” said Omar Saheb, Regional VP of Marketing and Online Business at Samsung Electronics MENA. The partnership, he added, gives customers “a genuine reason to choose Samsung for the experience, not only the product”.

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For subscribers, Premium brings the usual package: ad-free listening, offline downloads, richer audio quality on Galaxy Buds and Samsung sound devices, and Jam, which lets friends build a shared queue.

“At Spotify, we are always working to make every listening moment feel more personal, meaningful, and worth it,” said Rami Jamal, Head of Partnerships at Spotify for South Asia, Middle East, and Africa.

The demographics go a long way to explaining the strategy. Across MENA, Türkiye, and Pakistan, nearly seven in ten Spotify streams come from listeners aged 18 to 34, according to the company — precisely the audience Samsung wants inside its hardware ecosystem before buying habits harden.