Optiemus Infracom, the brand behind the sales and distribution of BlackBerry-branded devices, has today launched KEYone smartphone in India today. The smartphone is priced at Rs 39,990 and will be available exclusively on Amazon India from August 8. The company has also announced partnership with Vodafone. Vodafone users including new and existing will get 75 GB of data with three months of validity.
The company is calling this model the BlackBerry KEYone Limited Edition Black in India. This model supports Dual-SIM connectivity and this is the first ever BlackBerry smartphone with dual-SIM, says company.
The smartphone was first announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017. The major highlight of the device is the Smart Keyboard, which has a fingerprint sensor on the spacebar and a capacitive touch on the entire keyboard for scrolling. One can ‘Flick’ predictions using the BlackBerry KEYone keyboard, and also assign shortcuts to keys for actions such as browsing, triggering the camera or Messaging app.
To recall, the BlackBerry KEYone will be the last smartphone designed by the company itself. This is due to the fact that it has given away the license for designing and producing smartphones to its partner TCL. BlackBerry has also entered into a long-term licensing agreement with Optiemus Infracom Ltd for the production of future BlackBerry Android handsets in India. Optiemus will also manufacture, design and sell future handsets neighbouring countries including Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh as well.
The smartphone sports an aluminium frame and a 4.5-inch full-HD (1620×1080 pixels) IPS display with a Pixel density of 433ppi and has Corning Gorilla Glass protection. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core SoC clocked at 2GHz, coupled with 4GB of RAM and an Adreno 506 GPU. It has a 64GB of inbuilt storage that is expandable via microSD card (up to 2TB).
The smartphone runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat operating system. It is backed up by a 3505 mAh battery and has QuickCharge 3.0 with a ‘Boost’ charging feature that gives 50 percent charge in “roughly 36 minutes.” On the camera front, the smartphone offers a 12-megapixel rear camera with a Sony IMX378 sensor and an 8-megapixel front facing the camera with a wide-angle lens and a flash module. Besides, the smartphone offers hybrid dual sim, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a USB Type-C port. The smartphone measures 149.3 x 72.5 x 9.4 mm and weighs 180 grams.