Who wants a BlackBerry? Apparently, Gen Z

The Star

4 hours ago

When Victoria Zannino was in middle school, back in 2013, her father gave her a precious hand-me-down in the form of a used BlackBerry. Back then, the device was a marvel. Unlike most phones on the market, it had a physical keyboard, albeit tiny, and a private messaging service called BlackBerry Messenger that she and her friends could use to text.
'I just feel like the time of the BlackBerry phone was very nostalgic,' Zannino, now 25 and working in advertising, said in an interview. 'Growing up watching 'Keeping Up With The Kardashians,' seeing them driving with one hand on the wheel and a BlackBerry in the other hand was just such a slay of a moment.'
Zannino's yearning for the piece of older technology led her to post a TikTok calling for its return.
'PLEASE blackberry,' she wrote over a selfie, 'I beg you to make your move and make a come back.'
The video has been viewed more than 6 million times and received more than 500,000 likes, backing up the idea that Zannino isn't alone in her nostalgia for older phones.
All over TikTok, young people are romanticising the era of the BlackBerry, despite the fact that many of them weren't old enough back then to have a phone. It is part of a larger trend in which people are posting and sharing videos of what they call 'nostalgia tech.' They miss the tactile keyboard, they say, and the smooth feel of the trackball beneath their thumbs.
Dig in on the various videos, and what they really seem to miss is a simpler time when their entire lives didn't exist inside their phones, which, at that point, were just gadgets akin to a portable CD player or a Game Boy.
Dan Kassim, a 29-year-old writer who describes himself as 'elder Gen Z,' said he didn't get his first BlackBerry until after college, but he still feels a flash of yearning for the older phones of his youth.
'The thing about these phones that we had in the 2000s and 2010s – everyone remembers them really well because they embedded in those memories of our childhood or early adolescence,' he said. 'So there's that real kind of pull on the heartstrings when people bring them up.'
Kassim has posted several TikToks about the BlackBerry resurgence, to which many young users have responded with a desire to bring back what they call 'retro' phones. He believes that – much like the embrace of flip phones by so-called Luddite teens – the trend can be chalked up to a rebellion against the hyperconnected world we currently live in.
'I think there's a charm to the BlackBerry and older phones and all that kind of retro tech,' he said. 'It ties into vinyls and Polaroid pictures and all of that. I feel like people are kind of burned out from the notifications and being always on, and BlackBerrys and early smartphones feel like a bit of a throwback to when phones were tools but not, like, the centre of your life.'
While some users are purchasing old BlackBerrys to use as their everyday phones – despite the fact that many of the apps no longer work – others are demanding a reimagined version for 2025. But after BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion) ended its support for the devices in 2022, and an attempt by a company called OnwardMobility to create a 5G version was scuttled shortly after that, there's little hope for a new BlackBerry anytime soon.
Still, the nostalgia lives on, at least on TikTok.
'It's interesting that it's happening on TikTok, because I feel like TikTok is the most addictive form of social media,' Kassim noted. 'And you couldn't actually use a BlackBerry to work TikTok.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.