This Raspberry Pi-powered BlackBerry beeper parties like it’s 2009

The heydey of mobile devices with built-in keyboards is long past, eclipsed by bigger and bigger touchscreens that are now flipping and folding. But if your heart still burns for BlackBerry, the smartphone for anyone who sent more emails than text messages before the iPhone came along, there’s a new DIY project you might want to check out. It’s called the Beepberry, and though it isn’t actually reviving the form factor, it’s trying to give your thumbs the sweet, sweet feel of a tiny phone keyboard.

The Beepberry is a custom PCB with a teeny-tiny 2.7-inch black and white LCD screen, a Raspberry Pi Zero W ’round back covering the basic OS and wireless duties, a battery, and what looks like a genuine BlackBerry keyboard, including the company logo button and a tiny built-in touchpad. The gadget runs Pi OS Lite, but that’s merely a means to an end, that end being the Beeper app and service. The Beepberry is meant to replace your phone’s chat apps, and only chat apps, hooking into standard SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Slack, Discord, and (with a bit of custom home server magic) Apple’s iMessage.

SQFMI

As the showman says, that’s all there is, there isn’t any more. While the Pi Zero W can hook into local Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, the Beepberry can’t connect to mobile networks without extra hardware, and if you want a case you’ll need to 3D print one yourself. (Though they do look pretty snazzy!) As noted by Ars Technica, one of the gadget’s demo videos has the hobby-grade, 3.7-volt battery