Makes me curious: is there an open firmware for old Blackberries? As I feel like it could be just as interesting to play around with that (at the bare metal level, I mean; just writing apps for the Blackberry OS isn’t too interesting.)
Not that I’ve seen. The hacker/tinkerer community never adopted BlackBerry the way they did iOS or Android (or even Palm or Windows Mobile) and the BlackBerry focus on security (putting aside giving foreign governments BBM keys for a minute) meant that unlocking bootloaders on the BBOS and QNX BB10 devices would be more challenging than other phones of that vintage, since a huge selling point to IT admins was that it was safe to put these things on your network.
Obviously someone could jailbreak the bootloaders with enough effort, but I very much doubt many of the components would have drivers in the Linux kernel (the Bold 9900 which was the most powerful BBOS device ever released I think had a Snapdragon SoC and Qualcomm really doesn’t like to open up its drivers) and the effort involved in even trying would almost certainly be more trouble than it was worth.
