TikTok Users Call for Return of Blackberry and Other Retro Tech
Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.
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June 20, 2025This post was originally published on this site
Barely old enough to hold the devices when they were popular, young social media users are longing for “nostalgia tech.”
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,” Ms. 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.”
Ms. 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 six million times and received more than 500,000 likes, backing up the idea that Ms. Zannino isn’t alone in her nostalgia for older phones.
All over TikTok, young people are romanticizing 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.
@danwrites Did you ever have one of these phones? #retrotech #blackberry #dumbphone #blackberry2025 ♬ original sound – Dan | Writer 📚
