You can read and write files on a BlackBerry using an iPhone. Should you find yourself in 2005.

By Oliver Haslam
published

iPhone and BlackBerry
iPhone and BlackBerry (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Did you know that you can connect an iPhone to a BlackBerry?
  • And if you did, what about transferring files?
  • Turns out it works, and way better than you'd think.

Remember BlackBerry? Sure you do. It's the company that owned the smartphone market until Apple came along. Well, it turns out having your business taken away by a company you mocked isn't as bad as it gets. Having your phone dragged out to show just how interoperable a modern iPhone is – that's as bad as it gets.

And that's exactly what this video shows. We see an iPhone connected to a BlackBerry from the mid-2000s – admittedly, there's a dongle involved – with various files and whatnot transferred between them. You can even use an iPhone to install "apps" on a BlackBerry, apparently. I'm putting scare quotes around "apps" because let's be honest. These things aren't apps. Not like we've become accustomed to today.

Anyway, check the video out if you've a spare few minutes. Especially if you were around when BlackBerry's Mike Lazardis was looking down on the 2007 iPhone from his lofty perch.

Only to be knocked well and truly off of it.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

1 Comment
  • God I miss my BlackBerry smartphones... I've been using "touchscreen" smartphones for text input for years, and I still hate it. By the way, comparing RIM BlackBerry OS apps to Apple iOS apps is not really a fair comparison, because it is effectively like comparing Microsoft MS-DOS programs to Ubuntu / Apple macOS / Microsoft Windows programs... Whilst Microsoft offered the "premium" apps experience with their "crunch a computer into a smartphone and hope it sells" approach, BlackBerry OS apps were typical of most other mobile device operating systems at the time (the various versions of Symbian OS, Palm OS, etc). You are right about how foolish it was for RIM to mock iOS though, because we know how that turned out... Funnily, Microsoft did the same thing with regards to Google's Android, which is pretty much the only competitor to iOS these days.