TCL to launch two more BlackBerry smartphones this year

On top of that, these devices will not be sporting a physical QWERTY keyboard.

“Impressively created to be distinctly different, the BlackBerry KeyOne reimagines how we communicate by offering unmatched productivity and the world’s most secure Android smartphone experience”, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO for TCL Communication. The Canadian company continues to tout the phone’s security features as the biggest plus point, something that will continue to appeal to large scale government departments and security-conscious consumers.

The BlackBerry KEYone will officially launch in April for $549. Yes it did. After models like the Priv fell flat, failing to reignite past glories of yesteryear, the Canadian company instead chose to license the brand name at the end of a year ago.

One thing that makes the BlackBerry KEYone unique is its physical QWERTY keyboard, but this is nothing odd for those using the Priv. Similar to previous BlackBerry trackpads, users can simply swipe on the keyboard to navigate through the web, emails or use it to write messages. Over the keys, beneath the display, there’s the conventional Android trio of capacitive buttons.

Tucked into an anodised aluminium frame and soft-touch textured black, this is indeed a BlackBerry phone that pays homage to its predecessors while offering durable build quality. The phone draws control from a 3,505mAh battery which ought to keep going an entire day on a sole charge.

On the camera front, it will sport a 12MP rear camera with aperture of F2.0 along with 8MP front camera with F2.2 aperture lens.

The KEYone sports 12 megapixel camera as the primary one and the front camera is of 8 megapixels. It occupies the bottom portion of the smartphone, leaving room for a smaller but sufficient, 4.5 inched screen that offers a resolution of 1620×1080 pixels.

KEYone runs an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC clocked at 2.0GHz and 64-bit Adreno 506 graphics processing unit. The handset is fitted with a 3505mAh battery with fast-charging support.

What the KeyOne certainly isn’t, though, is a flagship smartphone. While the KeyOne seems like it was designed by BlackBerry, from now on the hardware will be outsourced to TCL, a Chinese company that also owns the Alcatel brand. One key feature which the the new smartphone has made a decision to ditch is the slide out QWERTY keypad present in the Priv. Android 7.1 Nougat comes installed on the device, along with BlackBerry’s trademark Hub messaging app, the DTEK application security feature, and a commitment to quickly patch any Android vulnerabilities that are discovered.