My 2009 BlackBerry has become a paperweight because time is unforgiving.

Although it was released in 2009, I bought my BlackBerry Curve 8520 in 2010, when I was 18 years old. I remember being on a budget, but I wanted to make the leap from Nokia and its clunky Symbian OS, which had been with me for a long time. The idea of having a slightly more robust OS, an app store and BBM for chatting with friends seemed very interesting to me.

With its pros and cons, this BlackBerry Curve 8520 stayed with me for almost a year, until I finally traded it in for my first Android phone. After that, the RIM phone kept hanging around the house for several years and, at some point, ended up in a drawer. It’s now 2022, that little guy is back in my hands and I’m wondering what it can offer me today.

BlackBerry 8520 in 2022

Now I recognize that, even at the time I bought it, it was already a pretty limited phone. Camera, storage, connectivity, etc., were outclassed by other offerings, but from what I remember they were more expensive. However, something that surprises me about this device is its durability. It has been around for more than 12 years and is still working, with the limitations that we are going to discover in the following paragraphs.

From a hardware standpoint (mainly at the internal component level), the phone has stood the test of time quite well. The front part, where the screen and the QWERTY keyboard are, is in very good condition, something I can’t say about the sides, whose buttons literally disappeared. It is as if the rubber had “expired” to the point of detaching from the terminal.

On the back, the cover has suffered a little more the passage of time, as well as the rubber part containing the word “Curve” and the camera hole. The top row of buttons also deteriorated, but internally everything seems to work fine. The buttons, the camera, the speaker, the screen, the antennas. I conclude that if it weren’t for these parts that wore out, the device would be in near perfect condition.

But what is a phone without software? Today, more than ever, we live in a world where equipment gets “old” relatively easily. The hardware may survive, but software upgrades turn them into devices that run very slowly or simply stay on old system versions, and with that, the latest applications no longer work. So what happens to a device that is about 12 years old?

If it weren’t for the parts that have worn out, the equipment would be in almost perfect condition.

Sometime between these last few years I made the mistake of factory resetting the phone and storing it in a box with a 50% charged battery. The choice of the battery I think was not so bad, but the choice of erasing all of its contents was. Little did I know at the time that RIM was going to kill the Blackberry App World app store for BlackBerry OS 5 and simply stop making phones and discontinue all of its services in the mobile market.

Thus, I found myself in 2022 with a phone of yesteryear, but completely empty. My hope was, perhaps, to connect it to a Wi-Fi network and try to run some of the apps I used to use in its heyday, such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Nimbuzz (a client to connect to Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger). The idea was to test, although the companies behind these could have simply wiped out the connection to their servers as well.

As I mentioned above, I also had no way to use the app store. In a pointless attempt, I tried downloading a version of the store to my computer, transferring it to the phone and doing a manual install, but my idea didn’t work. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but as a curious person I wanted to give it a try and experience that feeling first hand.

Due to an issue of obsolete security certificates, the built-in browser was completely out of use. I couldn’t connect to secure sites - and what sites are not secure these days? My attempts to update the mobile certificates also failed. So, as time went by, I began to see this device as a nice paperweight, or perhaps as a new addition to my collection of old phones, which included, for example, a Kyocera 2235.

At one point I remembered that Opera Mini had been a browser that I had used on this same device at the beginning of the last decade. Curiously, I found a way to install it, so it seems to be one of the only apps that works on a BlackBerry 8520 these days. Seeing the browser start up motivated me, and seeing that I could surf the Internet with its small 2.46-inch screen stole a smile.

However, the moment of happiness was fleeting. Browsing, Opera Mini browsed, but half of the contents of the pages I tried to access simply wouldn’t load. On ToastyBits and other pages whose main focus is text I could read articles, although most of the images were not displayed. Other elements such as videos or banners were completely out of play.

In the ToastyBits internal Slack channel, I told my colleagues about this experience. Alberto de la Torre and Javier Pastor encouraged me to write about it with some interesting ideas. Javier Lacort, for his part, suggested that I try the phone with some of the most popular services currently available. So I gave it a try, although I ruled out the possibility of downloading and installing applications.

With WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter apps off the radar, I logged on to Opera Mini, instagram.com. The result? The page simply loaded the social network logo. I did the same with m.facebook.com and, surprisingly, it worked. The social network loaded in its most spartan version, just like back in the day. I felt like I was in a vintage experience of the social network, where everything seemed simpler. It was all about giving likes, visiting profiles and sending the occasional message to my friends. Then I tried to repeat the experience with twitter.com, but I was unsuccessful.

In the case of the Spotify, Netflix and TikTok pages I also had bad luck. The first asked me to upgrade to a supported browser, the second allowed me to log in, but I failed to play any content, and the third loaded erratically and therefore wouldn’t let me move forward at all. 

Having discovered the limitations of an older version of Opera Mini, I moved on to explore the other possibilities offered by the phone. The BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application was still there, even calling me by my name, Javier, and displaying my PIN. Unfortunately we know that this service stopped working on all platforms in 2009, so it was just a nice decoration. I also found the email app, but it was impossible to use it.

Far from being the end, the BlackBerry 8520 still had something to offer me. I could send SMS’s and write notes in “Notepad”. In the case of the latter, I thought I’d squeeze it out for a few minutes to remember what the experience of typing with a physical keyboard was like (which some would like to see again on current phones). After a couple of attempts I came to the conclusion that, in this section, it would personally be impossible to go back. I am too used to on-screen keyboards. 

The mobile could also be used to make and receive calls, although this possibility will disappear as 2G networks are switched off in different parts of the world. The rest of the available applications offered me a completely local experience. The camera still worked to capture images, the clock, calendar and media player also served their purpose, the latter with files transferred to the memory card.

A final thought

Beyond this anecdotal experience, I can’t help but think again what would happen if the email app, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, BBM and others of that time still worked as they did in their best days. I don’t mean with current functionalities, but those functionalities they offered more than a decade ago.

I know we are in a constantly evolving world, and we need to move forward, but sometimes I think that for those who just need to send WhatsApp messages, read tweets or check basic information on the web, they don’t need to have such a modern phone. However, no matter how good the equipment is in good condition, its software has a definite expiration date.

When we buy something, we implicitly sign a time-of-use contract. We know that sooner or later that device will join the club of obsolete devices. And it doesn’t matter if the hardware you paid for still works perfectly, the heart, which is the operating system and its ecosystem, will wither with the passage of time, because time is unforgiving.

On ToastyBits | This was the HTC Dream, the first ever Android phone (and yes, it had a QWERTY keyboard)