Barack Obama has finally given up on BlackBerry

Alan Martin June 13, 2016

Et tu, Barack? BlackBerry has already lost the support of Facebook and WhatsApp, and now it’s lost the White House. It’s not clear if 50 Shades of Grey author EL James is still on board, but you’re hard pushed to find any big endorsements in 2016.

Obama made the revelation on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, in a segment about how he’s going to adapt to life as a civilian after eight years in the White House. “I was this cool high tech guy when I got there, and I was the first president to have a BlackBerry,” Obama explained. “Years pass and no one else has BlackBerries, and I’ve still got the clip on the belt.”

“Then finally this year, they said ‘good news Mr President, we’re going to give you a smartphone instead of a Blackberry’,” Obama added, no doubt upsetting a number of BlackBerry executives along the way, who weren’t aware their devices were now viewed as an entirely different species.

Obama didn’t specify which smartphone he was given, but suffice it to say, it didn’t quite live up to his expectations.

“I get the thing and they’re all like, ‘well Mr President, for security reasons – this is a great phone, state of the art – but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text, the phone doesn’t work, you can’t play your music on it.”

“Does your three year old have one of those play phones? It’s got stickers on it… that’s basically the phone I’ve got.”

Still, when Barack Obama leaves the White House next year, he will at least finally be able to have a crack at David Cameron’s Angry Birds high score.

Hillary Clinton, the next Democratic nominee favours iOS over Android, as the clip above shows (with a small shout out for BlackBerry, presumably for work reasons). Meanwhile Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, switches between Android and iPhone for his tweets, despite vowing to boycott Apple over their dealings with the FBI. This promise, like many of Trump’s, expired after a few days.