BlackBerry Mercury with physical keyboard goes official as KEYone

At  CES last month, BlackBerry gave a glimpse of its latest Android smartphone codenamed Mercury, and told that they will reveal more details at MWC. 

Now at MWC 2017, Barcelona, BlackBerry has officially given the Mercury a name, and its called KEYone. The new smartphone comes courtesy of TCL, which has exclusive rights over BlackBerry Brand. The KEYone is the last proper BlackBerry smartphone as it is designed by BlackBerry, and going forward, TCL will be responsible to manufacture and distribute BlackBerry branded smartphones, while BlackBerry will focus on software and security solution.

The main highlight of BlackBerry KEYone is its iconic QWERTY keyboard below the display. The buttons are backlit, and there's a feature called flick typing and the keypad responds to touch gestures as well. The keyboard also includes 52 customizable shortcuts and the fingerprint sensor is hidden inside the spacebar.

The BlackBerry KEYone features 4.5-inch Full HD (1620 x 1080 pixels) display and is powered by Snapdragon 625 processor, paired with Adreno 506 GPU and 3GB RAM. On-board storage is 32GB, which can be expanded via microSD card.

For photography, there's 12MP Sony IMX378 rear camera (w/ dual-tone LED flash, PDAF and 4K video recording), the same camera seen on Google's Pixel device. On the front there's 8MP f/2.2 camera for selfies and video recording.

Connectivity options include 4G LTE, WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC and USB 3.1 Type-C port. It runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat and BlackBerry promises to push the latest security updates when available. The phone also comes pre-loaded with DTEK security monitoring app and BlackBerry Hub. 

A 3505mAh battery runs the show that supports  Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging, that can charge the phone up to 50 percent in just 36 minutes.

The BlackBerry KEYone is priced at $549 (Rs. 36,600) / 599 Euros / 499 GBP in the U.S, Europe and UK respectively and will be available globally starting from April in a single Black hue.

Kaiser Bey

Kaiser is a tech enthusiast who likes to write, read and talk about tech. He dreams of going to Mars and never come back. We hope that you find his posts on AndroGuider helpful and informative