Last year BlackBerry made a step in a new direction, one that the general population saw coming from a mile away. The company would stop manufacturing smartphones. Was it a surprising decision? Not at all, considering that the last attempt by BlackBerry at making a smartphone was the BlackBerry Priv. Unfortunately, rather than do away with smartphones altogether, BlackBerry has merely outsourced the division. The latest result of this strategy is the BlackBerry KeyOne.
The BlackBerry KeyOne comes to us from TCL, the same company that gave us the BlackBerry DTEK 50 and the DTEK 60. However, unlike the DTEK series, the KeyOne has the tragic honour of being, what looks like, the last “BlackBerry-designed” BlackBerry smartphone. While under the hood it’s all TCL hardware and build quality, it thankfully lacks TCL’s standard aesthetics.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the BlackBerry KeyOne is the pricing. It’s being sold at $549 and so far the only thing that merits the price is the fact that TCL is calling it a flagship smartphone. When it comes to specs, the KeyOne is as average as you can get.
Powering the KeyOne is a 2.0 GHz Snapdragon 625 SoC that’s backed by 3GB of RAM. 32 GB of internal storage is standard but that can be expanded via a microSD card slot. The battery meanwhile is a 3505mAh variant, which is admittedly quite large and should deliver more than a day’s worth of battery life. A USB Type-C port will help ensure you get lightning fast charging speeds. A 12MP rear-facing camera and an 8MP forward-facing camera complete the mid-tier standard. The OS is Android 7.1 Nougat.
The smartphone falls short in a surprising category, display size. The KeyOne comes with a dismal 4.5-inch 1620×1080 LCD display. The reasoning for the small display is something all BlackBerry users should be familiar with, a keyboard. You would think that BlackBerry would get with the times after consistently outputting sub-par smartphones but apparently, the message hasn’t gotten through. The keyboard is touch enabled and you can program each of the keys to perform a function after a long press, such as opening up the browser on pressing the “b” key.
However, considering that you can get other Snapdragon 625-powered smartphones for around $200, it looks like BlackBerry has yet to escape from the realm of the overlooked and unnoticed.
