TCL has today announced at CES 2018 that the BlackBerry Motion will become available to buy in the US starting from January 12, Friday. This latest BlackBerry-branded smartphone will be sold as an unlocked phone and priced in the US at $449.99. Which is largely in line with the prices it has become available in other regions already. When the BlackBerry Motion does hit online store shelves, it will be available to buy Amazon as well as Best Buy.
The BlackBerry Motion was first announced back at the start of October and since then has slowly been widening its availability, with the smartphone already too available to buy in a number of countries in Europe and the Middle East. As such, its arrival to the US will add North America to that list of available locations. This is largely considered to be a sort of follow on device to the BlackBerry KEYone, as this is the second major release following the partnership forged between BlackBerry and TCL. Although unlike the KEYone, the BlackBerry Motion does away with the iconic BlackBerry physical keyboard in favor of more screen real estate and a physical home button emblazoned with the BlackBerry logo. Which is also where the included fingerprint sensor can be found. One of the other hardware additions is a smart ‘convenience’ key which can be customized for different uses/locations/situations.
As for the specs, and speaking of that greater screen real estate, the BlackBerry Motion features a 5.5-inch display along with a 1920 x 1080 resolution and an anti-scratch coating. Inside, the BlackBerry Motion manages to pack in 4GB RAM, 32GB storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC. Cameras comes in the form of a 12-megapixel rear camera coupled with an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. This is a phone which boasts an IP67 rating for protection against dust and water encounters, and comes powered by a Quick Charge 3.0-supported 4,000 mAh battery. The latter point is one of the major selling points with this smartphone as it is the largest capacity battery included with a BlackBerry phone to date. and the device does also. Additional features include microSD card support (up to 256GB), a USB Type-C port, a headphone jack, the usual selection of BlackBerry security-focused software tweaks, and Android 7.1 (Nougat) pre-installed – with confirmation that it will be updated to Android 8.0 (Oreo) “later this year.”
