BlackBerry has just announced the BlackBerry Mercury that they briefly teased during CES last month, though the company announced it under a different name, the BlackBerry KEYone. Those of you who are interested in checking out the main announcement of this smartphone, follow this link, as we’re here to take a closer look at the specs of the company’s newest smartphone. Contrary to what most people thought will happen, this is not exactly a high-end device, as it is fueled by a mid-range SoC, but nonetheless, it’s a really compelling offering, especially if you want a full physical QWERTY keyboard.
The BlackBerry KEYone features a 4.5-inch 1620 x 1080 IPS LCD display with 434ppi. This display is protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass 5, and below the display you’ll find a set of capacitive buttons and a full physical QWERTY keyboard. This smartphone is fueled by the Snapdragon 625 64-bit octa-core SoC clocked at 2.0GHz, along with the Adreno 506 GPU which is running at 650MHz. The BlackBerry KEYone packs in 3GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable internal storage (expandable up to 2TB). A 3,505mAh battery is placed on the inside of this smartphone, and it comes with fast charging, as Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 tech is a part of this package as well.
A 12-megapixel camera (1.55um pixel size, Sony’s IMX378 sensor, PDAF, f/2.0 aperture) is placed on the back of the device, and next to it you’ll notice the dual-LED, dual-tone flash. An 8-megapixel shooter (1.125um pixel size, 84-degree wide-angle lens) is available on the front side of the BlackBerry KEYone, and even though there’s no LED flash on the front side of this phone, the BlackBerry KEYone can use its LCD display in order to brighten up your face, or whatever else you’re trying to take a picture of, as long as it’s close by, of course. The BlackBerry KEYone comes with a wide range of 4G LTE bands, and support for them will vary from market to market, depending on where you purchase the device. It does support 4G LTE bands for pretty much every region out there.
The BlackBerry KEYone comes with dual microphones with active noise cancellation, and a 3.5mm headphone jack is also included here. This smartphone also comes with a fingerprint scanner, though it is placed inside of the space bar on the phone’s QWERTY keyboard, which is a first, we’ve never seen anything like that. Android 7.1 Nougat comes pre-installed on the BlackBerry KEYone, with some additions by BlackBerry, as the phone comes with a number of BlackBerry apps, including the BlackBerry Launcher. The phone measures 149 x 7.24 x 0.94mm, in case you were wondering. The phone will become available in April all over the world, said BlackBerry.
