[andmikey]

I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]!

Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.

[bluecatswim]

>means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app)

Can't you use a web browser for those things?

[mato]

Here /Europe/ some banks are starting to require the use of mobile apps for authenticating transactions, instead of providing hardware tokens.

When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.

[andmikey]

Government apps no - both require a 'modern' Android or iPhone.

Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)

[throwaway3699]

For track and trace at least, it relies on the Google and Apple contact tracing APIs.

[Triv888]

Someone in this thread said that he updated SSL certificates to fix the website issue.