Before the official commencement of the MWC 2017, BlackBerry launched its latest smartphone called KEYone. This smartphone is the “last phone designed and engineered in-house by BlackBerry” as stated by the Canadian company. The new BlackBerry KEYone sports a physical keyboard that once made the ripples in the business smartphone market and made the “Curve” essentially an icon.
BB’s latest smartphone will be available beginning April 2017 at $549 (Rs 38,600). The company has also stated its decision to end smartphone design and production, and instead license the brand to its partners such as TCL.
BlackBerry is providing the Smart Keyboard, which has a fingerprint sensor on the spacebar as well as capacitive touch on the entire keyboard grid for scrolling. The smartphone runs on Android 7.1 Nougat with the company’s numerous productivity and security optimisations on top, such as Blackberry Hub and DTEK security monitoring app.
The smartphone sports a 4.5-inch full-HD IPS display with a pixel density of 433ppi and Corning Gorilla Glass 4. The smartphone is powered by the Snapdragon 625 Octa-Core SoC clocked at 2GHz, alongside 3GB of RAM and Adreno 506 GPU.
The KEYone sports a 12-megapixel camera with a Sony IMX378 sensor (same as on the Pixel). The front camera is an 8MP unit with wide angle lens and a flash module.
Internal storage is capped at 32GB with expandable storage of up to 2TB. It runs on a 3505mAh battery and has support for QuickCharge 3.0 which provides 50 per cent charge in approximately 36 minutes.
