BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the collapse of its smartphone business. The company today announced the sale of its valuable patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is Catapult IP Innovations Inc., a new company that BlackBerry describes as “a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire BlackBerry’s patent assets.”
BlackBerry says the patents are for “mobile devices, messaging, and wireless networks.”These are patents for BlackBerry phones, QWERTY keyboards and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). More recently, BlackBerry used these patents (which dealt with ideas like disabling message flow and showing notifications as a numeric icon icon) against Facebook Messenger in 2018. This was nothing new for BlackBerry, which is a veteran of the early smartphone patent wars. Back when BlackBerry was still called RIM, it went after companies like Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s.
Along with Windows Mobile and Nokia, BlackBerry was one of the big players in the mobile device market before the iPhone revolutionized the market in 2007. it was too, too late. The company abandoned BlackBerry OS development in 2015 when it launched its first Android phone, the BlackBerry Priv. The following year, BlackBerry also abandoned the development of phone hardware, abandoning the smartphone business entirely. The remaining die-hard users of BlackBerry OS devices lost access to BlackBerry servers in early 2022.
This brings us to the BlackBerry Zombie era, when a dead phone brand licenses its name to various third parties that are trying to survive the glory days. The first was TCL, which sold BlackBerry QWERTY hardware phones and several shamelessly rebranded phones. TCL stuck to this plan from 2016 until 2020 when it missed the opportunity to renew the license agreement. Later that year, OnwardMobility picked up the BlackBerry brand and promised to release the phone in 2021, but that effort was delayed until next year.
BlackBerry’s core business today revolves around automotive infotainment systems (where its QNX operating system is a popular option for car manufacturers) and corporate security.