BACKGROUND
Ailing phone manufacturer BlackBerry, which last week announced that it was cutting 40% of its workforce, is likely to accept a buyout offer from its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial, for what will amount to $4.7 billion. BlackBerry’s fall from grace now officially appears to be complete. The hardware division of BlackBerry is basically dead. The newest devices running BlackBerry 10 are consumer and enterprise duds. The only smartphones that BlackBerry sells now are its old BlackBerry 7 devices that are well trusted by large corporations and government officials. Read more >>
THE CARTOON
The cartoon by Kipper Williams from The Guardian shows a man in a suit (a typical BlackBerry user?) standing beside a grave in a cemetery. The inscription on the gravestone (or headstone) reads, "BlackBerry - FOREVER IN SILENT MODE"
EXPLANATION
If you put your phone in silent mode, you stop it from ringing (during a meeting, for example). In the cartoon, silent mode is used a metaphor for the 'death' of BlackBerry.
NOTE
The word BlackBerry uses CamelCase, which is the practice of writing compound words or phrases such that each word or abbreviation begins with a capital letter. Camel case may start with a capital or, especially in programming languages, with a lowercase letter. Common examples are PowerPoint or iPhone. [Wikipedia]
MORE BLACKBERRY CARTOONS
• Steve Nease (The Cagle Post)
• Terry Mosher (The Cagle Post)
