BlackBerry has signed over (mostly) global rights to use its branding on phones to Chinese manufacturer TCL. The news follows an announcement by the Canadian company in September that it would stop making its own phones and concentrate instead on services and software.

Under the terms of the agreement, TCL will “design, manufacture, sell, and provide customer support for BlackBerry-branded mobile devices,” while BlackBerry will chip in with the software and services. The deal is being touted as “global,” but there are some limitations: it won’t apply in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, or Indonesia. According to Bloomberg, this is because Blackberry already has a licensing agreement in place in Indonesia, and is currently working on another deal with an Indian company. It’s also interesting to note that this isn’t TCL’s first outing at the buying-defunct-smartphone-brands rodeo — it previously purchased Palm back in January this year (but never did anything with it).

This latest bit of news is really just the continuation of a familiar story for BlackBerry. In 2009, the company held 20 percent of the global smartphone market; that’s now shrunk to a barely-perceptible 0.1 percent. As this deal suggests, the brand still holds a certain appeal for some consumers (or name recognition at the very minimum), but as a phonemaker, the company’s last rites were read long ago.