TCL releases BlackBerry KEYone smartphone

TCL has released the BlackBerry KEYone. The device will appear first in the United Kingdom and will appear in many more countries in the coming weeks. The Android smartphone has a physical keyboard under the screen.

The KEYone will appear in a single UK store on Friday and will be on sale at multiple retail chains next week, according to the report Crackberry posted online. The KEYone is the first device with a physical keyboard that TCL releases under the BlackBerry brand. TCL’s two previous BlackBerrys, the Dtek60 and Dtek50, only have a touchscreen. It is still unknown when the BlackBerry phone will appear in stores in the Benelux.

TCL presented the KEYone at the end of February at the Mobile World Congress telecom fair in Barcelona. The phone has a 4.5″ LCD with a resolution of 1620×1080 pixels. That comes out to an aspect ratio of 3:2. The phone is 15cm long and 7.25cm wide, with a thickness of 9.4mm. Inside the case contains a battery with a capacity of 3505mAh, a large battery for a device with this screen size.

TCL, which makes the device for BlackBerry, has put a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625-soc in the phone. That 14nm-soc has eight Cortex A53 cores at a maximum of 2GHz and an Adreno 506 GPU at 650MHz. TCL has added 3GB of memory, with a storage of 32GB.

The phone is one of the first since the Pixel phones with Android 7.1 Nougat on board. It concerns BlackBerry’s ‘secured’ Android version with, among other things, Dtek security software and the BlackBerry Hub as a combined inbox in the firmware. On the back is a Sony IMX378 camera with a maximum resolution of twelve megapixels, with pixels that are 1.55 microns in size. The camera has phase detection autofocus and a dual LED flash.