After a long wait, BlackBerry has finally announced the ‘Mercury’ at the Mobile World Congress. The smartphone, so far known as ‘Mercury’, has been named the BlackBerry KEYone.
As we have told you in our previous ‘Mercury’ reports, the smartphone isn’t developed by TCL as an ODM device but happens to be the last in-house developed smartphone from BlackBerry. The main attraction is the smartphone’s backlit physical QWERTY keyboard, something that we haven’t seen in a long time. The keys are capable of responding to touch gestures and can also be used as a touchpad. What’s more, the keyboard integrates a fingerprint scanner, in the interval key to be specific. The smartphone runs on the latest Android 7.1 Nougat operating system out of the box, with the BlackBerry Hub and BlackBerry DTEK app for protection.
The KEYone features a 4.5-inch display with 1080 x 1620 resolution in a 3:2 aspect ratio, resulting in a pixel density of 434 pixels per inch. It is made out of anodized aluminum, with a soft textured finish at the back. The rear camera uses a 12MP Sony IMX378 sensor, the same sensor that has been seen on the likes of Google’s Pixel smartphones and the HTC U Ultra. The 1/2.3” type sensor boasts of large 1.55μm sized pixels, resulting in impressive image quality. The BlackBerry KEYone is powered by the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset inside with the Adreno 506 GPU. There is also a large 3505mAh capacity battery inside, supporting Qualcommm Quick Charge 3.0.
The BlackBerry KEYone will be going on sale globally in April this year. In the US, it will be sold unlocked for $549.
Via: GSMArena
