TCL Communication will bring the new BlackBerry Motion smartphone to Canada on November 10th where it will be available for purchase through local network operators Bell, Telus, Koodo, and SaskTel for around $600 CAD outright or alongside a mobile plan. The smartphone presents itself in a touchscreen-only design lacking a physical keyboard, and much like TCL’s previous BlackBerry devices launched this year, the Motion runs Google’s Android OS out of the box.
The BlackBerry Motion will be offered in Canada by Bell and SaskTel for the full price of $599.99 CAD, whereas at TELUS and Koodo, the device will be available for $605 CAD outright. Prospective buyers looking to acquire the device on a plan can pay $99 CAD upfront and sign a two-year premium plan with Bell, TELUS, or SaskTel, or acquire the device for $100 CAD upfront alongside a Tab Large plan with Koodo. As for what the device has to offer, the BlackBerry Motion is the first handset bearing the company logo to offer an IP67 dust and water resistance rating, and the fourth BlackBerry smartphone to adopt a full touchscreen form factor while abandoning the concept of a physical keyboard, following the DTEK50, DTEK60, and Aurora. The BlackBerry Motion features a 5.5-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and a screen-to-body ratio of around 71 percent. Inside it beats the heart of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset, housing eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz and the Adreno 506 GPU. The device features 4GB of RAM and 32GB of on-board memory which can be expanded via a microSD card by up to an additional 256GB, and relies on a 4,000mAh non-removable battery while shipping with Android 7.1 Nougat. A 12-megapixel camera with phase detection autofocus and a dual-LED flash resides on the back panel, whereas selfie enthusiasts will work with an 8-megapixel sensor.
Despite its touchscreen approach, the BlackBerry Motion has a somewhat similar design to the BlackBerry KEYone sans the front-facing physical keyboard. It features a metallic frame that seems to extend over the upper part of the back panel, which in turn employs a patterned material reminiscent of carbon fiber. A single physical home button sits at the bottom of the front panel, bearing the BlackBerry logo and doubling as a fingerprint recognition sensor.