It's so strange to me how little information there is on the internet about how the BlackBerry really worked.<p>Other phone OSes, both modern ones like iOS and Android, as well as ancient ones like Symbian or even the Nokia 3310 firmware, have their internals well described. All I could find about the BlackBerry was that it used some Java-based OS, but no detailed information about its architecture, conventions, file system layouts, security properties or technical capabilities seems to be available. The communications protocols are just as mysterious, especially on the phone-to-server side. I know it required some kind of carrier integration to work, which makes me think it wasn't just a bog-standard connection over TCP/IP, but I have no idea what it actually was.<p>There's some information in BlackBerry programming books, which can still be found in the "usual places", some old BlackHat presentations, which seem to mostly focus on the enterprise server component, as well as some company history and brief descriptions of the technical choices made in "Losing the Signal", but that's about it. Even Nintendo's OS is understood much more widely, despite Nintendo being much more secretive and litigious.