BlackBerry KEYone with Physical Keyboard and Nougat Announced

TCL has raised the curtain on the BlackBerry KEYone, previously known as “Mercury”, on the occasion of the Mobile World Congress 2017. BB KEYone is the first smartphone developed and sold by TCL Communication, after the licensing agreement announced by the two companies in December. 

A distinctive feature of the KEYone is the Smart physical QWERTY keyboard and a particularly attentive constructive aspect, which makes BlackBerry KEYone durable and stylish – is made of an aluminum body and finish with soft-touch texture. The hardware platform is based on Snapdragon 625 SoC, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable storage, while the display is 4.5 inches with a resolution of 1620 x 1080 pixels.

Coming to the camera features, the rear panel has a 12-megapixel Sony IMX378 sensor with 1.55-micron pixels and dual-tone LED flash. For selfie, there is an 8-megapixel front facing camera with wide-angle optics. It packs in a 3050mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 support, thanks to which you can get to a 50 percent charge in just 36 minutes. 

Of course, the main attraction is the physical keyboard, divided into 35 keys and adopts the gesture inherited from the BlackBerry trackpad to accelerate commonly used tasks, such as web browsing, composing texts and emails. BlackBerry KEYone’s Smart Keyboard, which has a fingerprint sensor on the spacebar. User can ‘Flick’ predictions using the BB KEYone keyboard, and also assign shortcuts to keys for use with a press or a long-press.

The software platform is based on the Android 7.1 Nougat operating system and can rely on BlackBerry’s software customization, such as the BlackBerry Hub, which improves productivity by grouping together all messages in a single hub and DETK security monitoring app. 

The BlackBerry KEYone price in USA is set to around $549, 499 GBP in the UK and 599 EUR depending on the market. It will be available worldwide starting from April in Black color only.

BlackBerry KEYone Specifications

• Dimensions of 149.3 x 72.5 x 9.4mm
• Weight of 180g
• Scratch-resistant Glass Display of 4.5 inches with 433ppi
• Resolution of 1620×1080 pixels
• Rear Camera of 12 mega pixels, Sony IMX378 sensor, 1.55μm pixel size, 1/2.3″ sensor size, f/2.0 aperture, PDAF, 4K video recording
• Front Camera of 8 mega pixels, 1.12µm pixel size, f/2.2 aperture
• Android 7.1 Nougat operating system
• 2.0 GHz octa-core Processor
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 14nm Chip
• Adreno 506 GPU
• 3GB of RAM
• Internal memory of 32GB
• Expandable memory up to 2TB
• Connectivity of 4G LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, GPS, A-GPS, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, USB Type-C
• Battery capacity of 3050mAh