Chinese smartphone company, TCL, has officially launched its latest flagship smartphone in China. The TCL 950. Which comes with premium hardware and is widely believed to be the device that will be the basis for BlackBerry’s upcoming handset, the DTEK60. The newly-unveiled device is built around an aluminum frame and is covered by glass on both front and back. It will be offered in Silver and Gold colors, and has been priced at 3,299 Yuan ($495). The smartphone will be available for purchase on the company’s website, as well as on popular e-commerce portal, JD.com. While it’s unlikely that the TCL version will ever reach U.S. shores, the BlackBerry DTEK60 is expected to launch stateside at some stage over the next few weeks.
As mentioned already, the TCL 950 is a premium smartphone. The device features a 5.5-inch AMOLED display panel which comes with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and has a brightness of up to 500 nits. The smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC that comes with a quad-core processor clocked at 2.15GHz and the Adreno 530 GPU. The rest of the tech specs include 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage which can be expanded by way of a micro SD card of up to 128GB in capacity. The Chinese model comes with support for dual SIMs, although, it remains to be seen whether that feature will be retained in the BlackBerry version.
Imaging options on the TCL 950 include a 21-megapixel primary camera on the back that comes with the Sony IMX230 sensor with an f/2.2 aperture, while the front-facing selfie-cam is an 8-megapixel unit. The phone carries a 3,000mAh battery and supports 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v4.2, GPS, A-GPS and USB Type-C connectivity options. The phone also comes with some interesting software features such as ‘Dual Apps’, which supports two instances of the same app running simultaneously. That allows users to operate two different WhatsApp or Facebook accounts on the same device without having to change user accounts. The device also has a multi-function key on the right edge that can be used to open apps etc. The device also comes with a fingerprint scanner on the back.