I'm at the airport in Dallas, after a four-hour flight without usable Wi-Fi. That means I have about four hours of email to catch up on. But it's not just any email: it's Monday morning, pre-trade show, I-never-told-anyone-I'd-be-traveling email. It's a lot of email.

Yet here I am, just deplaned, and it's handled. All of it, including plenty of well-considered and lengthy replies, and nothing put off until I could get to a computer. I handled it while I waited for rows 1 through 19 to get their luggage out of the overhead bins, and I did most of it one-handed while crammed betwixt holiday travelers.

This is what the BlackBerry Classic was made for: jamming on email with one hand, pounding out replies like a boss, confidently walking off the plane and to the airport bar to pay exorbitant prices for watered-down drinks that make the pain of modern air travel slightly more bearable.

If only it were made for anything else.

If you make your purchasing decisions based off nostalgia, there's much to commend the Classic to you. Anybody over 30 has the BlackBerry deeply seated in their lizard brain as the de facto image of what a smartphone is, and so simply looking at the Classic evokes a kind of primal sympathy. If I were stricken with aphasia after a horrific brain injury and somebody asked me to draw a smartphone, I would draw the BlackBerry Classic. More recently, we've gotten used to phones with elegant chamfered edges and expansive black panes of shatterproof glass, but the Classic isn't about smooth lines or spartan aesthetics. It's about having a real, proper, don't-mess-with-me keyboard. The keyboard means the screen has to be smaller, but the screen is less important than the buttons. It's a 720 x 720 3.5-inch LCD that feels cramped when compared to virtually any other smartphone. Really, though, the only problem with the square screen isn't that you can't see more content on it, it's that you can't fit a big enough line of coke on it before you start trading stocks. You see, this phone is about work, damn you, and that craggy keyboard and those extra buttons serve you in the same way they served your father and his father before him. It's the Tommy Lee Jones of smartphones: old-fashioned, not afraid to yell, and handsome in its aging, rugged way. You always know what you're going to get with good old Tommy Lee Jones — and you'll never get anything else. Same thing with the BlackBerry Classic.

The keyboard is the entire reason for this phone to exist, so let's talk about it. It's great, like really great. It's possible — probable even — that I am just as fast with a good software keyboard as I am with the Classic's keyboard. But the BlackBerry feels better to type on. The keys click just so, with the carefully designed ridges that register the right letter no matter how you fat-finger it. There simply isn’t a more satisfying typing experience to be had with two thumbs. And having a keyboard always there makes all sorts of everyday tasks faster. Instead of thinking about which app you need for a given task, you just start typing a name or a web search or whatever from the home screen. Then, the BlackBerry Assistant app kicks into gear and filters down to what you need. What's more, you can set most of the keys as long-press shortcuts, giving you somewhere around 25 system-wide ways to jump to your favorite thing. The most satisfying typing experience with two thumbs It's not just the keyboard that's retro: there are four actual, real physical buttons and an optical trackpad sitting between the keyboard and the screen. The "toolbelt," as it’s called, is an easy target for ridicule. There are literally Send and End buttons, as though the primary thing we did with our phones was call people. (Call quality, if you must know, is very good.) But I'll defend the toolbelt, because the buttons on it are surprisingly useful. The gestures that BlackBerry 10 uses for back, menu, and home are finicky at best — so the toolbelt solves that problem. You can hit the end button to power the phone on and to go home, you can use the back button to close apps from the home screen, and if you're a pro user, you'll know that the BlackBerry button is a magic gateway to yet another layer of keyboard shortcuts. Even the trackpad, that hilarious vestigial button from an age before touchscreens, manages to be useful. You can scroll wicked fast with it, and combined with the shift key you can multi-select messages and blast them into your trash bin. Or, if you really must, you can bring up a mouse pointer in the browser to make clicking on tiny links easier.

This is a review, so I should tell you about the weight, battery life, camera, and performance. I will, but please understand: When I tell you these things, I’m not doing it to help you decide whether it is suitable for your needs. I am not doing it to help you make a purchasing decision. Here is your purchasing decision: you shouldn't buy this phone. The BlackBerry Classic is a noble failure, and noble failures teach us more than banal successes. It’s a rocket that fizzled on the launchpad, not a Cessna making a shaky landing. And so, to review: the battery life is pretty good! It’s above average for late 2014, which equates to around a day and a half of moderate use. It's heavy. It has a plasticky back that's grippy but cheap-feeling. It has a tremendously slow 8-megapixel camera on the back. Here are two pictures I tried to take of my cat. This is a chill cat, the kind of cat who is willing to stick around and wait for a long shutter time. But she is a cat. She has limits.