BlackBerry, which sold off its mobile business to TCL Communication last year, launched the company's swan-song phone — KEYOne — with proprietary QWERTY keypad in Barcelona on Sunday, February 26, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017.
BlackBerry KeyOne comes with a gorgeous design language with a compact form having a good blend of glass and metal. It boasts aluminium-based shell on the back and comes covered in Gorilla Glass 4 with 'impact resistant nature' and physical QWERTY keyboard having fingerprint sensor on the spacebar and also capacitive touch sensors on the entire keyboard for scrolling, at the front.
Also read: MWC 2017: LG unveils X Power 2 with massive battery; all you need to know
It also boasts top-of-the-line camera. It houses 12MP auto-focus large pixel camera with Sony IMX378, same as seen in Google Pixel phone, which is touted as the best camera phone in the market. Up front, it features an equally impressive 8MP camera with a wide angle field of view and full HD video-recording ability.
Another interesting aspect is that the phone comes packed with a 3,505mAh cell, the biggest battery for a BlackBerry phone to date. It also comes with QuickCharge technology, which can power up the phone from zero to 50 per cent in 36 minutes.
Under the hood, it is quite under-powered as it comes with mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor backed by 3GB RAM, 32GB inbuilt storage and Android 7.1 Nougat OS.
BlackBerry KEYOne costs $549 (approx. Rs 38,584) in the US, €599 (roughly Rs 42,158) in Europe and £499 (around Rs 41,433) in the UK and will hit stores in April.
With the launch of BlackBerry KEYOne, the Canadian mobile firm will no longer make or design phones and will now on focus on developing mobile-security software. Having said that, the new owner of the BlackBerry's mobile business — China-based TCL Communication — will continue with the legacy of the former smartphone pioneer both in terms of selling and servicing of BlackBerry-branded mobile phones.
Watch this space for latest news on BlackBerry, TCL Communication and MWC 2017.
Key specifications of BlackBerry KEYOne:
| Model | BlackBerry KEYOne |
| Display | 4.5-inch IPS LCD screen with 1620x1080p resolution
|
| OS | Android 7.1 Nougat |
| Processor | 2.0GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor |
| GPU | 650MHz Adreno 506 |
| RAM | 3GB |
| Storage | 32GB flash, expandable up to 2TB |
| Camera |
|
| Battery | 3,505mAh; 4.4V non-removable Lithium Ion with Quick Charge v3.0 technology ( can power the phone from zero to 50% charge in 36 minutes) |
| Add-ons | Fingerprint sensor, On-scree/ white LED indicator, Type-C USB v3.1 port, Bluetooth v4.2 LE, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n; dual-band: 2.4GHz&5GHz), FM radio, NFC (Near Field Communication); proprietary BlackBerry security softwares |
| Dimensions | 149.3 x 72.5 x 9.4 mm |
| Weight | 180g |
| Price |
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