Blackberry Classic is a Classic Blackberry Phone in a Touchscreen World

This was supposed to be the year of Blackberry retrenching into mobile healthcare and defense solutions, or popular chatting services like BBM, in order to survive the death of the old Blackberry phone model – but apparently not everyone at the company has got the memo yet. Point in case: the newly released Classic, a Blackberry smartphone that shows exactly why people don’t buy Blackberry phones anymore.

The Classic is a baffling move in more ways than one. It includes a physical keypad, which the world has moved on from en masse but is include here because, apparently, Blackberry still cannot part from brand-killing traditions. It also includes a trackpad, a weirdly square touchscreen (yes, both a physical keypad and a touchscreen). The company admits that the phone is targeted toward loyal business customers, but since the company has less than 1 percent of the smartphone market at the moment, this does not seem like a sound strategy.

The phone also includes 16GB of storage, 22 hours of battery life, and the Blackberry Hub, which is part of the Blackberry OS and combines all your messaging/email services in one long list. It also boasts the ability to preview incoming texts, which you may recognize as a feature that Android and iOS have had for more than a decade. At least you can still download some Android apps on the phone, as long as they are Amazon Appstore compatible.

The release of the Classic does, at least, make use of BBM messaging and extra security services that Blackberry still specializes in and, arguably, does better than most competitors. But the phone itself is such a throwback, it’s easy to wonder if this has been on the company’s backburner for the past several years (probably from back when it was RIM)and has finally slouched into an uneasy release date now, in the age of BYOD and work phablets.

If you love physical keypads instead of the admittedly awkward touchscreen keyboards and want a Blackberry Classic, you can get one for $449 through Amazon.com and the Blackberry website.