BlackBerry discontinues traditional keyboard phone

Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry yesterday announced it is discontinuing its classic phone that uses a physical keyboard and trackpad.

“Sometimes it can be very tough to let go,” Ralph Pini, BlackBerry’s chief operating officer and general manager for devices, wrote in a corporate blog post announcing the end of the BlackBerry Classic. “For BlackBerry, and more importantly for our customers, the hardest part in letting go is accepting that change makes way for new and better experiences.”

BlackBerry introduced Classic in late 2014 to win back customers who prefer plastic keys and trackpads to touch screens.

The company recently reported a quarterly loss of $670 million, which was about three times the company’s loss in the previous quarter.

Read more from The New York Times.