BlackBerry has confirmed it won’t make any more BlackBerry Classics, marking the end of an era.

US Senate staff were told BlackBerry was ceasing production of all BB10 devices but BlackBerry denies this, and insists that only the Classic production line has halted for good.

“It has been an incredible workhorse device for customers, exceeding all expectations. But, the Classic has long surpassed the average lifespan for a smartphone in today's market,” BlackBerry said in a statement.

This isn’t quite true. The Classic is actually younger, by some months, than the duration of a two year contract – it only began to ship at the very start of last year. It received a low-key European launch in Stuttgart days before Christmas 2014. We reviewed it here.

Yet the fact the Classic was released at all was a customer triumph: and a testament to just how practical and usable this once ubiquitous design really was. It was a form factor “brought back by popular demand”.

BlackBerry’s belated comeback with BB10 saw QWERTY devices, the Q10 and Q5, which had lost the familiar trackpad and the four dedicated hard keys, the so-called “toolbelt”. Customers missed the usability of the package: with the toolbelt, you never needed to move the phone in your hand to get anything done, or stretch your fingers. BlackBerry was already struggling for developer and consumer mindshare with its much-delayed platform, and small things like this mattered.

With BB10, BlackBerry also canned the now-outdated consumer BIS push email service (which also compressed and pushed through Twitter, Facebook and RSS data) which gave BlackBerrys their zip. So when the Q10 and Q5 launched, they gave users the spooky feeling of having a BlackBerry that didn’t feel quite right.

BlackBerry worked hard to create for the Classic a trackball, key-friendly imitation of the UX it had sidelined. BB10 was intentionally designed to be all-touch.

This is a design success that didn’t happen overnight, though.

BlackBerry’s design evolved from a landscape pager (the 850 and 950) to a phablet in 2001. Even then, RIM wasn’t confident it would become a handset giant The device was just part of three vital categories of technology RIM had needed to develop to take email mobile. It had needed to do over-the-wire data compression, and then needed to build out its worldwide network, creating network operations centres (NOCs). In 2002 a BlackBerry was still a niche business accessory, and RIM was keen on licensing the client for use on mainstream platforms.

Few ever thought RIM would transition its know how to become a successful consumer brand. See this list of “myths” from 2005, most of which were valid criticisms.

The market leaders in the first half of the Noughties – Symbian and Palm – just weren’t very good at email. Just not very good at all. Although Nokia had pots of cash and great design and engineering talent, and was building clever QWERTY designs, it was still reliant on third party software, including RIMs, to deliver enterprise email. And BlackBerry’s software for other phones just didn’t seem to work very well – if at all.

BlackBerry insisted to the world that its corporate customers would never buy phones with cameras or Bluetooth, yet the prize was enormous. So, partnering with carriers, RIM created a consumer version of its business software, and it was off to the races.

The best would be "RIM-killer" in 2007 wasn’t as slick, and certainly wasn’t addictive.

The Motorola Q9, running Windows Mobile.

Only with the 8000-series BlackBerrys launched in 2006, and the Curve the following year, was BlackBerry finally a mainstream alternative to carrying a Nokia. The “Classic” design, officially retired this week, really debuted in 2008 with the Bold 9000. This squat, leather-backed design felt instantly right. The Bold reminded you that it at last had a decent display – for years BlackBerrys had used monochrome or a muddy, washed-out colour panel. The Bold even added a shocking concession to popular demand – a 3.5inch socket, for music. The Classic’s design really differs only in straightening the rows of keys.

A flawed classic

“Classic” is about right, but it’s going to be the Classic's predecessors, such as the Bold, that end up in design museums. In truth the Classic was not BlackBerry at its best. The Classic was taller and heavier than the “classic” model it effectively superseded (the BBOS7 BlackBerry 9900) but it used exactly the same electronics as the two year old Q10.

Three months before the Classic had been released, BlackBerry had released its striking Passport, with much more modern hardware – which was important since users of the platform increasingly relied on an Android runtime. The Classic felt sluggish. The same design with the Passport's hardware would have had been a better proposition, but it was deemed too power-hungry and costly for an email workhorse. In the end, it fell between two stools: a slow phone using antique chips still cost £350. The promised Bronze edition, displayed at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2015, never appeared.

The rumour mill suggests that a 3:2 QWERTY device codenamed Mercury may be on the roadmap. But without that toolbelt, and a UX optimised for a toolbelt, it just won’t be a classic BlackBerry. For better or worse, this is a design story that ends here. ®