How could they do this? It feels so personal. I bought my first BlackBerry from Research In Motion in December 2004, the same week that I bought my company. While I was certainly not the earliest adopter (the company passed the 1m user mark that year), not many people in business yet had one.

For those of us who did, it changed our lives. No longer did I have to go into the office, or find an internet connection, to get my email. The hassle of having to dial up from my laptop in hotels, or trying to find an internet café, disappeared overnight. Less than a year later I bought a handset for everyone who worked with me.


I knew I was probably too attached to my BlackBerry by 2007, when my then seven-year-old son presented me with a customised ceramic creation, a plate on which he had drawn a picture of my device and the inscription “my other brother, BlackBerry”.

That was the year the iPhone was launched. I insisted on keeping my BlackBerry long after I had been persuaded to let the rest of the office migrate to iPhone, even though it meant having a server specifically for my software. I am nothing if not loyal. I finally caved in to Apple in 2014, but even then ran my iPhone alongside my BlackBerry for two more years.

For my generation of working women, the BlackBerry handset, as a technological breakthrough, was every bit as liberating as the introduction of the contraceptive pill had been to a previous generation. As it could email from everywhere, you could be out of the office and still work perfectly well, allowing you to combine motherhood with a career in a way that had not been possible before. Indeed, a friend at a large US company found her BlackBerry meant that she could work part-time for 14 years — and very few people ever noticed. Suddenly flexibility was for everyone. The “always on” approach had arrived.

Others did not welcome BlackBerrys into their lives with such enthusiasm. Its highly addictive nature, which led to the “CrackBerry” nickname, meant that people rarely put the handset down when they came home in the evening. One (male) friend of mine had his BlackBerry addiction cited in his divorce as number three on his ex-wife’s list of his “unreasonable behaviour”.

In a world where digital detox retreats are the new indulgence for the well-heeled, it is hard to remember a time before we were “always on”. But let us not forget that the BlackBerry started all that.

As one 50-year-old friend told me: “My heart was broken when my BlackBerry was taken away for me. It flashed a little red light when there was new mail. Bliss.” But that flashing red light drew us towards the device when perhaps we should have been doing something else. How does she feel now, on a iPhone? “It does at least mean that I now look for emails when I am ready, rather than jumping when I see it.”

BlackBerry is not dead. The software remains much loved by those for whom secure communication is vital. If Pippa Middleton had stored her photos on a BlackBerry, I hear the purists say, she would never have been hacked.

We should also salute the company’s chief executive, John Chen. It is brave to give up on something when so many people are emotional about it and that has been, historically, so successful. And it is probably the right thing. BlackBerry surprised on the upside in its latest quarterly results, something it had not done for a long time.

Even so, I wore black to my husband’s 60th birthday dinner. And I expect to be in mourning for some time to come.

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