TCL president and general manager Steve Cistulli has been personally stoking the fires online for the upcoming BlackBerry DTEK70, also known as the BlackBerry Mercury, and a new short teaser video on Twitter shows that he doesn’t intend to stop the hype train until it reaches the station at CES. Another teaser was released just recently; it was incredibly short, and offered a glimpse at the device’s keyboard. This one takes us past the keyboard and shows off how it integrates into the rounded, premium frame of the device. What’s on offer here is a frame design that apes the Pixel phones, and a keyboard that curves over to blend seamlessly into it at the edges.
The BlackBerry Mercury is an exciting device for more than a few reasons, not the least of which is that it’s not only the first QWERTY candybar Android phone in a long time, but the first one ever to sport a hyper-premium design. It also features the newest version of Android, being Nougat, with BlackBerry’s secure software suite and unique apps on top. It’s already been made plenty obvious that the device is going to get the full reveal treatment at CES, and Cistulli stoking the fires online is keeping the hype train rolling along nicely until the big reveal, as well as giving the folks who can’t attend and don’t have time to watch the live stream something to look forward to, if they like what they’ve seen of the device so far.
As a reminder, the upcoming BlackBerry Mercury has some pretty decent specs to match up with its premium design, if leaks and rumors so far are correct; the device is supposed to sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, alongside 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded with a microSD card. The 4.5 or 4.6 inch screen sitting on top of the well-spaced keyboard reportedly boasts a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, making for sharpness on par with current flagships that sport higher resolutions on larger screens. For now, of course, most of this is unofficial; we’ll know all this and more for certain when BlackBerry and TCL take the stage at CES to officially announce the device.