The carrier-free BlackBerry KEYone has finally landed in Canada after a couple of months of delays. The smartphone is now listed on Walmart’s online store; however, the bad news for prospective buyers is that, as of this writing, the device is already out of stock. In addition, while the smartphone seems to have been accompanied by a price tag of CAD $650 initially, it’s currently priced at CAD $729, which translates to roughly $581 at today’s conversion rate.
The BlackBerry KEYone was first released in Canada through local wireless carriers back in May, and the manufacturer initially planned to launch the carrier-free variant last month. This hasn’t come to pass, obviously, and the off-contract variant was then promised to be released “later this summer.” The demand for this particular variant of the handset was obviously rather high, as evidenced by the fact that it’s already out of stock. The good news is that the smartphone should be back in stock within the next 30 days, according to Walmart, and prospective buyers can provide the retailer with an email address to be notified when the unlocked KEYone is once again available for purchase.
As for what the BlackBerry KEYone has to offer, this is primarily a smartphone for people who don’t necessarily agree with on-screen buttons and would rather prefer giving up some screen real estate in favor of typing on a physical keyboard. Nevertheless, the BlackBerry KEYone aims to combine the best of both worlds, so the keyboard can also double as a touchpad, and users can still take advantage of autocorrect functions. The smartphone carries a nearly square-shaped 4.5-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 1620 x 1080 covered with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 4, and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 system-on-chip housing eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz, the Adreno 506 graphics chip, and 3GB of RAM. It carries 32GB of onboard storage expandable by up to 256GB via a microSD card, and also makes use of a 12-megapixel main camera, as well as an 8-megapixel front-facing sensor. There is a fingerprint scanner embedded within the physical space bar, and the device is powered by Android 7.1 Nougat and a non-removable 3,505mAh battery.