BlackBerry Style 9670 (2010) BlackBerry had spent years teaching people to associate the brand with one shape. A small screen. A physical keyboard. A trackball or trackpad. Then RIM did something that looked almost like a step backward. It made a BlackBerry that flipped shut. The Style 9670, released in 2010, was a clamshell phone with a full physical QWERTY keyboard tucked inside, plus two displays, including an external screen that let you check notifications without ever opening the phone. The reasoning behind it was actually pretty clever. Flip phones were still genuinely popular at the time, and RIM wasn’t trying to convince that audience they needed to become touchscreen enthusiasts overnight. It was trying to bring the familiar BlackBerry experience into a shape people already trusted and understood. You could close the phone after a call and the screen stayed protected. You could glance at the outer display for notifications without touching anything. Then open it up, and the familiar full keyboard was waiting right there underneath, same as always. It was almost RIM saying you don’t have to give up the way you’ve always used a phone just to own a smartphone. The Style wasn’t just nostalgic hardware wrapped around old habits though. It ran BlackBerry 6, carried a 5 megapixel camera with flash and video recording, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, expandable microSD storage, and an optical trackpad, with a 360 by 400 internal display and a 240 by 320 screen on the outside. That combination says a lot about where 2010 actually stood. The smartphone world was leaning harder and harder into touchscreens, but RIM was still willing to experiment with different shapes to fit different kinds of users. The Style holds a real distinction too, it was the first BlackBerry flip phone to carry a full QWERTY keyboard. It was deliberately priced to be accessible in the US as well, launching exclusively through Sprint at $99.99 on a two year contract after rebate. RIM was clearly chasing people who wanted a real smartphone without stepping into flagship pricing territory. There’s something a little ironic sitting underneath the whole thing though. RIM was finding new ways to fit the BlackBerry formula into the old phone world at almost exactly the moment its competitors were trying to replace that world entirely. Apple was pushing the touchscreen as the new default. Android manufacturers were experimenting with bigger displays and completely different form factors. RIM, meanwhile, was handing people a BlackBerry they could literally snap shut. And honestly, that wasn’t a bad instinct on its own. People loved flip phones for real reasons, they were compact, they protected the screen, and there was something satisfying about physically ending a call by closing the phone. The problem was that smartphone expectations were already moving somewhere else entirely. The Style feels like a genuinely fascinating snapshot of that whole transition looking back. Old phone design meeting modern smartphone features head on. A physical keyboard tucked inside. A notification screen sitting outside. GPS, WiFi, and a 5MP camera running underneath it all. BlackBerry OS 6 tying the whole thing together. RIM was trying to make the smartphone fit the way people already lived their lives. The rest of the industry was increasingly asking people to change how they lived around the phone instead. That gap was only getting harder to close from here. reality. tech. pattern.