BlackBerry KEYone Now Official; QWERTY Keyboard and Snapdragon 625

BlackBerry is back to its roots with the new BlackBerry KEYone. It’s a smartphone with a physical QWERTY keyboard paired with a Snapdragon 625 chipset.

BlackBerry KEYone Design and Display

Unlike the BlackBerry Priv, the KEYone has no sliding keyboard. To prevent the phone from being too long, it uses a 4.5-inch display with 4:3 aspect ratio.

The keyboard has backlight and responds to touch gestures. Hence, the user can swipe up, left or right in a feature called Flick Typing.

It’s housed in an anodied Aluminum body with soft touch back plate and Gorilla Glass 4 topped front panel.

BlackBerry KEYone Performance and Storage

The BlackBerry KEYone runs on an octa core processor from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 625. This is coupled with 3GB of RAM and its operating system is Android 7.1 Nougat.

It comes with 32GB of built-in storage and a microSD card for expansion.

BlackBerry KEYone Photography

For photography, the BlackBerry KEYone is equipped with a 12 Megapixel main camera with a large sensor and pixel size. It also has phase detection autofocus and a dual-tone LED flash.

Meanwhile, an 8 Megapixel selfie snapper is found on the front with large pixel size too.

BlackBerry KEYone Connectivity, Battery and Sensors

The BlackBerry KEYone is a single SIM smartphone with 4G LTE connectivity, dual band Wi-Fi, NFC support and a USB Type-C port.

It has a fingerprint sensor for security and a gyroscope for AR applications. This is placed behind the “space” button of the keyboard.

A non-removable 3505mAh Lithium-ion battery powers the BlackBerry DTEK70. Fast charging results in up to 50% battery capacity in 36 minutes.

BlackBerry KEYone Price and Availability

The official price of the BlackBerry KEYone is USD549. That’s roughly equivalent to PHP27,500 based on current exchange rates.

Its international availability starts on April but there’s no word yet on local availability here in the Philippines.