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It’s time for another Winners and Losers. This week, Chromebook users celebrated another win – this time in the gaming world – as BlackBerry fans officially lost all hope for a 5G revival.
It’s been a relatively quiet week in tech, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been plenty of rumours emerging ahead of MWC 2022. You can find everything we expect to see at the massive phone show next week in our guide.
As for this week’s winner and loser, scroll down to find out why Chromebook fans should get excited – and why BlackBerry fans probably shouldn’t.
Winner: Chromebook fans
Last week, we crowned Google our winner for releasing Chrome OS Flex, a new software designed to revive outdated Macs and Windows laptops by essentially turning them into Chromebooks.
It seems Chrome OS is on a winning streak here at Trusted Reviews, as this week we saw more signs that a Steam app is coming to the Google operating system.
9to5Google has been snooping in code and supposedly found a list of the first handful of Chromebooks set to support Steam, including devices from Acer, Asus, HP and Lenovo.
The report emerged just ahead of this week’s Steam Deck console release, suggesting that Valve is looking to expand across even more platforms in 2022.
Of course, one major difference between last week’s announcement and this week’s rumour is who will be celebrating.
Chrome OS Flex is designed to give a new lease of life to laptops in businesses and schools, while Steam is mostly expected to be coming to higher-end Chromebooks with more impressive specs capable of handling a gaming session.
Either way, Chrome OS fans (and gamers) are having a good few weeks.
Loser: BlackBerry
Moving on to our loser, tech startup OnwardMobility put the final nail in the coffin for BlackBerry this week when it officially cancelled its plans to release a 5G phone under the much-loved brand name.
If you’re sat here thinking “I thought BlackBerry was already dead”, you wouldn’t be the only one.
While BlackBerry phones had obviously dropped in popularity over the last decade, the company didn’t officially end support for devices running the BlackBerry OS operating system until January this year (newer, Android-powered BlackBerrys were not affected).
Despite the sad news being a long time coming, there remained a glimmer of hope for the brand in the form of a 5G model with the same focus on security and the iconic physical keyboard produced by OnwardMobility.
However, our dreams were short-lived as the startup announced just this week that it would be abandoning plans to release the phone.
While OnwardMobility didn’t state a reason for the cancelling of the phone, recent reports from Android Police would suggest that the Texan company went out of business after BlackBerry chose to cancel the licence that allowed OnwardMobility to use its name.
The decision was apparently made to allow BlackBerry to distance itself from its old smartphone seller reputation as the company has made a name for itself in recent years as a security software vendor.
If reading this has got you feeling nostalgic about your old BlackBerry, take a trip down memory lane with our timeline of all the best BlackBerry phones we reviewed.
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