If you thought the BlackBerry Mercury had a bit of a codename vibe to it, you weren’t wrong. Today at Mobile World Congress, TCL officially took the wraps..
If you thought the BlackBerry Mercury had a bit of a codename vibe to it, you weren’t wrong. Today at Mobile World Congress, TCL officially took the wraps of its first true BlackBerry handset, now going by the admittedly less sleek KeyOne (pronounced “key one,”) name. Though I suppose when your company is attempting to plant its flag firmly in the world of enterprise, sexy probably isn’t the main thing you’re looking for in a name.
The device looks much the same as it did when we saw it at CES, back when it shared a name with a Roman messenger god, small planet and element/poisoning you get from consuming too much seafood. TCL’s clearly gone out of its way to create something iconic that fits squarely with what most of think of when we think of BlackBerry.
It’s a tall device give its 4.5-inch screen – that owes mostly to the inclusion of the physical keyboard on the bottom, that most BlackBerry of features. New here since last time is the inclusion of a fingerprint reader in the keyboard’s spacebar, a cool little extra.
So, how many people are still looking for a physical keyboard in 2017? TCL/BlackBerry mobility GM Bruce Walpole admitted that demand is nowhere near where it was when the Canadian company’s marketshare first started eroding at the hands of the iPhone ilk. “We asked if people would consider a physical keyboard,” he told TechCrunch. “Twenty-five-percent of people said they would consider it.”
So, essentially, there’s potential demand there.
