BlackBerry KeyOne review

Move over, Samsung Galaxy S8. The BlackBerry KeyOne is the latest smartphone comeback story of 2017, even if the company behind it is really China’s TCL Communications.

It’s touted as the most secure Android phone, pre-loaded with smart, enterprise-level mobile software and, at last, delivers an old-school physical keyboard within a modern enough design.

This is the reinvented BlackBerry for everyone wholly determined to reclaim a tactile keyboard and BlackBerry Messenger. It works great for typing once you get used to the keyboard again.

‘CrackBerry’ addicts have something to look forward to here. But it’s a workaholic. BlackBerry KeyOne is all business in the front and back, less of a multimedia party anywhere in between.

The screen is bright and colorful, but its 3:2 aspect ratio leaves you with black bars on all 16:9 video and small-looking movies. The audio comes out one bottom-firing speaker. It’s like this phone clocks out at 5pm sharp when it comes to the fun stuff.

BlackBerry KeyOne is clearly an Android phone that has productivity users in mind. It’s one of the best at helping you manage tasks, even if it doesn’t have the latest chipset. It works as an entertainment device, too, but it’s not the best at it.

Does this new BlackBerry phone have enough of an enterprise advantage to lure you back from your on-screen, makebelieve keyboard? Let’s get down to business and put it to the test.

Price and release date

The BlackBerry KeyOne price is somewhere in between Wall Street and Main Street, costing $549 (£499, AU$729). It’s cheaper than an iPhone 7 or the Samsung Galaxy S8.

What it lacks in top-of-the-line internal chip specs it tries to make up for with unique features like sophisticated software and its physical keyboard. It’s a trade-off that makes it slightly cheaper.

There are two versions of the BlackBerry KeyOne in the US: an unlocked version that’s GSM and CDMA capable across the networks, and a summer-bound CDMA model for Sprint.

If you're lucky enough to be in or around London, England, you can get your hands on a BlackBerry KeyOne right now - with prestigious store Selfridges securing world exclusive availability until May 5.

After May 5, you'll be able to purchase the KeyOne throughout the UK at Carphone Warehouse, with more retailers and carriers coming on board through the month.

The BlackBerry KeyOne US release date is a longer wait. The unlocked model is scheduled for May 31, with the same on-sale date in Canada, too.

Keyboard

The Blackberry KeyOne is all about its physical keyboard in a world dominated by touchscreen iPhones and Androids. It’s the exact opposite of the Galaxy S8 and LG G6 all-screen trend.

BlackBerry’s signature keyboard is a welcomed change if you miss the tactile feedback of a real smartphone keyboard. It’s a throwback to a time before throwback Thursday was ‘a thing.’

It’s a throwback to everyone’s old Monday through Friday daily driver with 35-chicklet-style keys, and each one it properly backlit. There’s no need for an on-screen keyboard to hog your display.

It does take several hours of typing to re-learn how use it. At first, it’s problematic. B shares a key with ! and caused us to say “How’s your day goingB” with quickly apologize. “Sorry, mom.”

We found ourselves making fewer mistakes going back to a BlackBerry, but overall slower at typing. While we sped up our characters-per-minute output over time, we were never faster versus typing on an on-screen keyboard. Just more accurate and less autocorrect dependant.

There are several new twists to make life easier. It has 52 customizable shortcuts, so every long and short press gets you somewhere faster. Hold down on the ‘I’ key while on the home screen and you instantly get to Instagram.

Blackberry KeyOne has three-word suggestions across the bottom of the touchscreen as part of its contextual next word prediction engine. It’s smart, but could use punctuation predictions. 

Also, don’t expect helpful emoji predictions like you would on iOS 10. That’s too fun for a BlackBerry. Emojis are buried two menus deep.

You can, however, select a suggested word without ever lifting your thumbs from the keyboard. Just slide up on the keys and it’ll almost flick the word right onto the screen.

This word-flicking gesture works most of the time in one upward motion and feels slightly faster than tapping one of the on-screen choices. At times, we’d accidentally hit one of the capacitive buttons – home, back or recent – which sit in between the screen and keyboard.

The entire keyboard also acts as a trackpad, so you can scroll through menus and web pages as you lightly pet the keys. You, again, don’t need to put your fingers on the screen.

Flicking suggested words onto the screen and scrolling with the keyboard makes the screen feel slightly bigger, though we did run into instances where we tried to begin typing a text and were suddenly scrolling up our message history.

Phone design

The BlackBerry KeyOne has an air of sophistication to it, even as it blends the old and the new technology. It looks like a productivity tool carried by the workforce elite.

Its screen-and-keyboard combo is outlined in a silver anodized aluminum frame and backed by a black, soft grip textured rear cover. This stylish, two-toned look is has real character.

No, the rubberized back isn’t really leather, but it gives off that impression. The anodized aluminum frame is scratch-resistant and stood up to some completely on purpose minor abuse.

The most clever thing about this new BlackBerry design is that it hides the fingerprint sensor inside the small space bar at the bottom of the phone. It’s an odd shape for a biometric scanner.

The good news is that the blended fingerprint sensor works really well here with a near 0% fail rate. It’s also easy to access on the front and it can wake the phone from a screen-off state.

BlackBerry KeyOne likes to mix things up when it comes to the its buttons and headphone jack. The power is on the left side, the volume rocker is on the right and the 3.5mm jack is at the top. It’s like this grown-up smartphone is secretly a kid still playing opposite day.

There’s another button – the convenience button – that throws one more shortcut into design. It can be mapped to anything you want, unlike Samsung’s draconian Bixby button that does little.

We mapped the convenience button to launch the camera app, but found it more annoying than helpful due to its easy-to-mispress location. “Oh, the camera is open... again.” 

During calls, it functions as a mute button, which we found useful. It’s easy to remember this button exists during active calls, not when you’re first picking up your smartphone from a table. “Again, with the camera opening?!”

KeyOne is the second BlackBerry to use USB-C (after last year’s BlackBerry DTEK60) and this new, reversible USB standard is a helpful change, as it uses Quick Charge 3.0 for faster charging. Your old collection of monodirectional BlackBerry mini and micro USB cables are now useless.

There are two changes we would have liked to see in an otherwise great update the BlackBerry design. The mono speaker on the bottom frame helps no one, on-the-go entertainment seekers and business speakerphone devotees alike.

We’re also surprised the the BlackBerry KeyOne doesn’t have a dual nano SIM tray when many unlocked phones out of China now have options for using either a second SIM or microSD card. This just has the latter expandable storage option, not dual-SIM to the chagrin of jet-setting international business travelers.

Screen

The BlackBerry KeyOne display shares the front face of the phone with the keyboard, so it can’t compare to an trendy new all-screen Android phone. You just can have everything in life.

What it does is give you a bright, but misshapen 4.5-inch Full HD screen. One third of the real estate taken up by non-screen parts (keyboard, capacitive buttons and a front-facing camera).

It feels like a 5.5-inch display thanks to its familiar 3-inch width, and we wouldn’t want it much longer. Anything taller would make this already 180g phone feel top-heavy when holding the very bottom of the keyboard.

We end up with a screen that’s bright, colorful and gives you more usable space thanks to the the keyboard and trackpad-like scrolling. But not every app adjusts to a 1,620 x 1,080 resolution.

You’re going to run into problems with the 3:2 aspect ratio on a daily basis. All 16:9 video feels extra small with top and bottom black bars. Snapchats and Instagram Stories are also cut off.

The good news is that most scrollable productivity apps and interactive games adapt to the size. It’s just movies and fixed-length photo apps that give the BlackBerry KeyOne trouble.

You’ll find split-screen multitasking thanks to Android 7.1 Nougat, but it’s a bit cramped. There are a few sacrifices if you want a keyboard on a smartphone in the modern day.

BlackBerry software and Android 7.1

The KeyOne runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat with a BlackBerry twist. You have access to all of the Google Play Store apps, plus a few enterprise-focused programs and interface tweaks.

BlackBerry Hub is the highlight of the software. It combines all of your notifications, messages calls, and events into one streamlined location. You can easily sift through your hectic work life.

We were also able to add accounts for just about everything: BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), texts, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp and Twitter.

Have you ever gotten a message from a friend who chats with you sometimes on Facebook Messenger, and other times via text? The roulette wheel of which app to open after you dismiss the notification isn’t a factor with BlackBerry Hub. It’s all a shortcut to the right app every time.

BlackBerry Hub works only because of deep customization. You set custom alert rules and create recipes to effortlessly toggle which accounts show up instead of doing it one-by-one. 

For example, we were able to create custom views: ‘Daily Work Day’ and also ‘Vacation Mode.’ Beyond the initial setup, we never had to check and uncheck our many accounts. Twitter, Slack and work email alerts got turned off in Vacation Mode, but texts and Facebook Messenger were enabled. That’s reserved in the ‘Daily Work Day’ recipe for a productive day.

BlackBerry Messenger is here and it’s a viable messaging app, but hardly the best. We liked the Time and Retract feature (Snapchat for grown ups) and Glympse location app integration. We were less impressed by its sponsored ads, UI design flaws and lack of a desktop companion app. This is an enterprise phone, right? You also can’t type part of a message and finish it by dictation. The microphone button is rudely replaced by the send button.

DTEK is the security app that keeps your phone safe and lets you know immediately when it’s not. It constantly monitors your device’s security status level and even gives you a rating.

You can also review permissions of every app on your phone to understand what information your apps have access to, and keep track of your vulnerabilities. DTEK is the one BlackBerry app you never want to really have to use.

BlackBerry KeyOne has a stock Android vibe, but it does make minor changes. Swipe out the small edge menu and you’ll see a digest of your calendar, messages, tasks and contacts.

We found more use from the tweaked recent menu (that’s the square-shaped capacitive button to the right of the home button). It opens up your most recent apps in an assorted gridview. It’s easier to browse through your apps this way than with the fanned-out look every other phone seems to go with.

We also dug the green call-in-progress circle that floats on the screen when you navigate away from an ongoing call (akin to a Facebook Messenger chat head). It’s really easy to be able to navigate away from a call, but be able to snap back to it when needed. That’s such a small, but important for an enterprise-grade BlackBerry phone.

BlackBerry tries to pull off a 3D touch-like shortcuts interface on top of its homescreen apps, but it’s not fleshed out just yet. Swiping up on apps with three dots underneath sometimes gets you a mini window of the app’s most important information (helpful), but too many apps don’t support this yet and it’s just shortcut option to adding their widgets to the homescreen (not helpful).

Specs and performance

The BlackBerry KeyOne is priced less than a Samsung or LG flagship phone for good reason: it doesn’t have flagship level specs and performance, even it’s close enough for most people.

Its Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core chipset is fast enough for almost all day-to-day work tasks, and its 64-bit capabilities ensure multitasking is remains fairly smooth.

Where we see occasional slowdown, it mostly happened when we were playing games. Both its 3GB of RAM and Adreno 506 graphics chip put the KeyOne a step behind other phones workplaces should be considering, so don’t expect the smoothest frame rates or performance.

It also starts with 32GB of internal storage, not 64GB, and while it has a microSD card slot, it doesn’t turn into a second nano SIM slot for dual-SIM use.

What gets us is the the BlackBerry KeyOne is touted as the best for business users, but has the okay specs of a mid-range phone and no travel-friendly dual-SIM support. 

Its occasional slowdown and single-SIM support shouldn’t turn you off if you love the keyboard, but it is an odd pairing: mid-range specs with high-end phone design and software features.

Camera

BlackBerry KeyOne actually borrows camera specs from other top-tier flagship phones with a 12MP sensor that’s right out of the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL.

Its main 12MP camera captures large 1.55um and we found it to do a superb job in daylight and a decent job in low light, too. A lot of this is thanks to multi-frame low light capabilities that try to suss out the best photo from multiple shots.

It has Phase Detect Auto Focus for faster focusing, and electronic image stabilization (EIS) for steady photos and video when you (the camera taker) move the camera ever so slightly. We found EIS video to be smooth, but not as gimbal-steady as optical image stabilization (OIS) on the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus cameras.

You’re also going to have a better chance at a good photo in low light with the Google Pixel or the Pixel XL due to both backend and front-end software. The shared Sony IMX378 camera sensor only does so much for the BlackBerry KeyOne.

Turning on HDR helps tremendously, but we found photos to generally be a little darker than we would have liked without editing them first to increase exposure. But what really stuck out was the default camera app. It’s an unfixable nuisance.

BlackBerry’s camera app has very few modes (Photo, Pano, Video and Slow-Mo) and they’re all hidden in a mode menu. That means you have to dig into a menu to switch between photos and videos instead of having available on the screen at all times. It’s a cumbersome mess.

The KeyOne can shoot 4K video at 30 frames per second and 1080p at 60fps. Oddly, switching between all of its various video resolutions and frame rates is right at the top of the camera app. That’s at least easy to access.

The front-facing camera takes 8MP shots with similar results as the main rear camera. Great in daylight, but its f/2.2 lens and 1.125um pixel size can’t stand up to low light. It’s obviously more of an issue on this less powerful selfie camera. 

Moving subjects should still be advised to stay absolutely motionless in low light. Next person to say ‘Cheese’ is out of the photo.

Battery life

BlackBerry KeyOne is a smartphone built for today’s workaholics right down to the battery life. It lasted us almost a day and a half in our real-world battery life tests.

Its 3,505mAh battery capacity is rated for 26 hours, but we found lasted longer by draining only 2% whenever we set the phone down and left it idle at night (testing time: exactly eight hours). So the official 26 hours turn out to be closer to 36 hours for us.

The Snapdragon 625 chipset is at least battery efficient. Testing it further, we found watching an looped HD video for 90 minutes at full brightness only took the battery down to 89%, losing a very respectable 11%. Here’s something else to like: Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 capabilities juice the phone back up to 50% in just 36 minutes, according to BlackBerry. We found identical results. 

In 15 minutes we were at 22%, and at 30 minutes 44%. The pace slowed down a bit after that, taking 1 hour and 52 minutes total to reach 100% battery life.

BlackBerry casts its fast charging capabilities as ‘Boost Mode,’ and while every phone company has their own spin on charging names (when the tech usually is identical), this one does give you unique options to suspend some performance for faster charging gains. 

And while the BlackBerry KeyOne doesn’t have an always-on screen for anything else, it always does let you know the charging percentage and slowly growing a red and then green bar along the side of the screen whenever it’s plugged in.

BlackBerry KeyOne is the smartphone for anyone who has said ever ‘I miss my old BlackBerry.’ It reinvents the tactical QWERTY keyboard phone for the modern Android era.

It’s successful at resurrecting the best of BlackBerry: a physical keyboard, sophisticated-looking, two-tone design and smart, secure software. It looks and feels like it’s meant for business.

That’s why not everyone will be a fan. Yes, this is a great workplace phone with multitasking in mind and BlackBerry Hub for answering combined messages sources from almost any app. But it won’t impress you in video performance with its 3:2 screen. It makes 16:9 movies look small and its mid-range specs can’t compete with today’s all-screen smartphones.

That said, the all-work-and-no-play enterprise class will look beyond its lackluster multimedia prowess and appreciate its solid build quality, excellent battery life and fairly good camera. You’re not going to find a better BlackBerry, so quit asking. It’s finally here.

Should you buy it?

This new BlackBerry phone fits a specific type of person, and they pretty much know who they already are: exiled BlackBerry users who have felt forced to trade their physical keyboards for on-screen keyboards over last half decade. Businesses considering buying this for their employees should appreciate the front-and-center security app and BlackBerry Hub. There’s no excuse for workers to miss your messages now. Anyone just looking to stand out with this old-meets-new smartphone will have an instant conversation starter with anyone over 35 and a lot of “What’s that thing?” from younger millennials.

Who is it for?

Ever been called a ‘CrackBerry’ before? Yeah? Then this phone is for you. It’s the first truly reinvented BlackBerry that sticks to almost everything you loved about the old classic, but shines in 2017 with an updated screen and Android Nougat software. If you can get back into the routine of typing on chick lit-style keys, you will revel in owning a BlackBerry again and party like it’s 1999 (when the original BlackBerry 850 came out).

Competition

Samsung Galaxy S8

Samsung Galaxy S8 is more expensive, but it combines many of the workhorse capabilities you'll find on a BlackBerry with entertainment value the KeyOne is missing. Samsung touts its specialized Knox security software and has implemented an iris scanner and secure folder to boot. We don't like its fingerprint sensor as much as the one embedded in the BlackBerry KeyOne space bar and Samsung's keyboard attachment isn't nearly as good if you're bent on touching physical keys everyday.

Full Review: Samsung Galaxy S8

BlackBerry Priv

The BlackBerry Priv isn't too dissimilar from the new BlackBerry KeyOne, however, it has a slide-out keyboard, it's now slightly cheaper and offers a different chipset, the Snapdragon 808. While the KeyOne's 625 chip is going to be fine for work-related multitasking, you're going to find more entertainment power behind the Snapdragon 808. The Priv's screen is also more suited for movie watching, if you're looking for a BlackBerry that can handle work and play.

Full Review: BlackBerry Priv