The BlackBerry KEYone has undertaken the rite of passage that most smartphones seem to now go through – scratch, burn and bend testing. As to be expected, this latest round of testing comes from YouTuber, JerryRigEverything, who has become very well-established at performing these tests, and setting a benchmark for smartphone durability overall.
As for the BlackBerry KEYone’s performance, it seems things were a little mixed. When it comes to the scratch test, due to the inclusion of Gorilla Glass 4 it would be expected that the KEYone’s screen would maintain its durability up to a level 6 on the Mohs scale. Which is exactly what was found during testing. Display aside, the keyboard was found to be prone to scratching, although JerryRigEverything does note that the scratching does not affect the performance of the keyboard – which is of particular importance as the keyboard includes touch controls and navigation. Likewise the fingerprint sensor is housed beneath the space-bar and as a result, remains protected and completely functional, in spite of the space bar becoming fairly scratched. The rest of the smartphone also generally seemed to be durable enough, due to a mixture of a resilient back cover, and metal accents throughout. With the exception of the panel surrounding the headphone jack, which is plastic.
Moving on the burn test and generally speaking the performance of the KEYone was again good. The screen took around 16 seconds before being substantially marked, although it also did seem to recover quickly and remained responsive afterwards. Where the issue did lie though, is with the bend test. In short, the KEYone did fail the bend test, although the phone itself did not bend and break in the usual manner. Instead, the screen very quickly popped out of its socket, at which point it became completely unresponsive. Essentially, resulting in the disabling of the smartphone. The reason attributed to this was due to a lack of adhesive ensuring the screen remains locked in its socket, with JerryRigEverything noting that this is probably an easy fix by the manufacturer. Although that is less likely to be something that bodes well with an owner who finds their screen popping out of its socket.