Remember when Research in Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones set the bar? My first smartphone was a BlackBerry 7130e. I loved the phone. And then my son gave it..
Remember when Research in Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones set the bar?
My first smartphone was a BlackBerry 7130e. I loved the phone. And then my son gave it a bath in a ginger ail. The 7130e had it all: A scroll wheel, Java apps, a keyboard and a swappable battery that would last for days. That phone came out in 2005 and I had mine until 2009.
Ironically, Research in Motion started to struggle around the same time my 7130e died. The company held onto its past too long, renamed itself after its flagship product, and you know the rest, pretty much drove itself into irrelevancy by fighting Android and clearly defined market data.
Until yesterday.
BlackBerry just revealed the KEYone. And look, it has a physical keyboard. In 2017. Why not?
There are some underlying differences between this device and classic BlackBerry devices. First, BlackBerry is not manufacturing this device. TCL is making this handset for BlackBerry. Second, the KEYone runs Android instead of an in-house operating system.
