HackBerry (in memoriam 7730)

24 January 2007 by Rod McLaren

The BlackBerry 7730 came out in early 2004, and started to be superceded by the mobile networks in favour of the 8700 series from late 2005. It has the best physical design I’ve seen on a handset, by which I mean the way it works in your hand and in the real world (rather than the technical capabilities its physical components provide – the amount of memory it has, its screen resolution, and so on, which is now pretty long in the tooth). The keys are easy to hit because it’s bigger than the current devices and their tactile feedback is good, the thumb-wheels work better than newer models. It feels really good in hand, and has better build quality than the iPod. It didn’t need “ruggedising” before it went into enterprise field situations. The whole package is incredibly robust and hard-wearing, and I can only guess that a major reason to shelve it was than the bill of materials was too high. We’ve been running a few hundred of these devices in a hard-wear field environment since 2004 with a customer and most of them are still going strong. (The RIM people look at these like they’re antiques when we wave them about.)

Reusing the exoskeleton

It’s the nature of consumer-prosumer electronics to keep moving forward – RIM are very unlikely to revisit the 7730 casing with contemporary internals themselves. In another couple of years, when BlackBerry models look shinier, Pearl-ier, iPhone-ier, I like to imagine that the 7730 series exoskeleton will seem sufficiently old, and irrelevant to the brand that RIM would consider selling the physical design to another company. (This kind of thing happens in other industries – for instance car designs are sold as platforms to other companies who want to minimise their design and R&D costs – but I haven’t heard of it happening in mobile, perhaps because the product lifecycle is generally quicker.) Imagine buying the rights to this obsolete design from RIM, hacking out the internals to replace them with a newer (more generic?) chipset and board, OS stack, bluetooth and so on, and selling it into the niche between those expensive super-rugged Symbol devices and the fully-featured consumer/executive smartphones: a cheap, reliable, usable data-only handset for field operations.

Others much smarter than me might have an idea whether such a package is economically designable or (re)manufacturable. I like the idea, though I can’t see RIM ever going for it. But it’s a shame to see such a lovely and competent object disappear because its internals didn’t last more than a couple of years.

Related: Managing device heterogeneity in enterprise mobile services looks at the pitfalls of typical mobile operator product replacement lifecycles being twice as fast as those in enterprises.

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