The problem is that iPhone and Android were stealing users from that pool. Lots of BB users loved the physical keyboard, but I feel many of them were fairly easily lured away by the greater functionality offered by touchscreens. BB actually tried to hold on to this niche for quite a while, they didn't launch their touchscreen-centric BlackBerry 10 line until 2013.
I regularly miss having a physical keyboard on my phone, but I'm not sure I would give up things like good web browsing, watching videos, or rich maps to make it happen. People are ultimately willing to downgrade their experience in a few activities like messaging in order to make other activities like web browsing actually viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z <- this was an android phone with a keyboard, and far from the only one.
I think that if people kept buying these in significant enough numbers, manufacturers would still be making them.
There are a lot of very vocal niches. I got real excited when Apple put out the iPhone 12 mini, I even bought one. But the rest of the market said no, and now there is no more Mini-sized iPhone. We may be noisy, but our niche is not large enough to sustain the devices we want.
As a side note, there are still good Android phones with expandable storage, they just aren't made by Google or Samsung. Sony still makes them.
Those phones were also the best MP3 players I ever owned - I had an iPod touch at the same time and the UX of copying over/selecting/playing music on that simply didn't compare.
A lot of the problems that make the use-cases you mention more difficult/annoying on modern phones are someone's business model and have little to do with actual form-factors or lack of physical keyboards. E-mails/texts/etc can be made more efficient on today's devices - it's just that it's more profitable not to.
That's unfair. There was a bit (or a lot) of innovator's dilemna going on.
It was really the rise of BYOD policies that killed blackberry I think— they had enthusiastic fans but it was a pretty small group relative to those who would pick the iPhone given a choice.
If RIM was willing to downsize and continue serving the niche of users that just want a good keyboard for messaging and don't care about content consumption or apps, they could still be around today making products for that niche. But things don't really work that way in a market that only rewards perpetual growth.
Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well. And it did exceedingly well.
The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email.
The keyboard is as good as they get.
The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more.
It is really hard to convey how great it was, without being able to offer up demos. I have bought keyboard add ons for iPhone and Android as they have become available and usually died quickly.
I even tried to get a company going to create a "blackberry look alike" on Android but in the end I didnt get financing and making Android be classic BB is not easy.
It was not good for games, web browsing, apps in general, but that didn't matter because it did what I needed it to do
BB from then on was a sinking ship, b/c they figured they would add all the features from the iPhone and Android to it. And eventually released an Android phone.
They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved.