The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone which was first announced earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017, in Barcelona, has now been released in UK. The smartphone is available for purchase in the UK from Selfridges retailer at a price tag £499, which is approximately Rs 41,367. Moreover, the company has also announced that Carphone Warehouse will be the next retailer wjo will be selling the BlackBerry KEYone smartphone in the UK from May 5 onwards.
Surprisingly last month, the BlackBerry KEYone was found listed on one of the Indian online re-seller’s website with its pricing and full specifications, alongside product images. However, listing showed the device as ‘Coming Soon’ with the price tag of Rs 39,999. This listing also indicates that the smartphone might be launched in India as well in the coming days.
BlackBerry KEYone is going to be the last smartphone designed by BlackBerry, as in September last year the company had announced to give away the license for designing and producing smartphones to its partner TCL. On the other hand, BlackBerry has entered into a long-term licensing agreement with Optiemus Infracom Ltd for the production of future BlackBerry Android handsets in India.
As far as specifications and features are concerned, BlackBerry KEYone’s Smart Keyboard, it 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.
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 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 506 GPU. It has a 32GB of inbuilt storage that is expandable via microSD card (up to 2TB). The smartphone runs on Android 7.1 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 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.