Blackberry Mercury QWERTY Smartphone to Officially Launch as KeyOne

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The Blackberry Mercury has been in the rumor mills for quite a long time. It was unveiled at the CES 2017 event held in January in Las Vegas. Later today, the company will be officially launching the device in Barcelona; just before the Mobile World Congress begins. However, the latest information from GSMarena revealed the device to go on sale with a new name. The device is officially named as Blackberry KeyOne instead of Mercury or the rumored DTEK70. It comes with a QWERTY keyboard and is manufactured by the Chinese company, TCL. Apart from Blackberry smartphones, the company also manufactures and sells the TCL and Alcatel branded smartphones.

The earlier launched TCL made Blackberry smartphones are just the rebranded variants of the Alcatel smartphones. But now, the company launched perfect Blackberry smartphone with QWERTY keyboard. Unlike the Blackberry Priv, which came with a slider keyboard, the KeyOne features a regular QWERTY layout along with 4.5-inch display offering 1620 x 1080 pixels resolution and 3:2 aspect ratio. There is also a Gorilla Glass 4 on top of the display for the extra protection. It runs on the latest Android 7.1 Nougat along with Blackberry Hub that brings all the iconic Blackberry features into a single app.

Under the hood is the Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor clocked at 2.0GHz and coupled with Adreno 605 GPU. It also packs 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage that can be further expanded upto 256GB via MicroSD card slot. It is kept powered on by a 3500mAh non-removable battery and supports Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging technology. The battery on this device can be charged from 0% to 50% in just 36 minutes. The interval (space) bar in the fourth row of the QWERTY keyboard also comes integrated with a fingerprint sensor. The Keyboard also supports touch gestures for using like a touchpad on laptops.

Coming to the camera department, there is a 12MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF, and dual tone LED flash. For selfies, there is an 8MP front camera with 1.12 µm pixel size. Both the cameras can record videos at a maximum of Full HD resolution. The power button, volume rocker, and the SIM card are placed on the right edge of the device. On the left edge is the BlackBerry Convenience Key that can be customized for different operations. In between the display and QWERTY keyboard are the three capacitive navigation buttons for back, home, and multi-tasking (from left to right).

Connectivity options include 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS, 3.5mm Audio port, and USB Type-C port. With the NFC and fingerprint sensor, the KeyOne can be used for making payments using the Android Pay. In the next few hours, we will also get the official pricing and availability details of the Blackberry KeyOne smartphone. Stay tuned for more updates!

 

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