The BlackBerry KEYone smartphone that was announced back in January and then again shown off at the MWC seems to be running through a couple of obstacles before it can make its way to the hands of waiting consumers.
BlackBerry’s comeback phone facing delays, likely to be released in May
According to reports, The TCL produced BlackBerry smartphone was supposed to have been available by April. But now it seems like the smartphone will only officially be available a month later, by May. The KEYone had a lot of BlackBerry fans excited and perhaps due to production snags and hitches in development, the company has incurred a delay.
The reason for the delay apparently was because the company did not want to disappoint fans by not being able to produce their phones efficiently for the demand. Since the KEYone has received significantly positive responses from around the world, they wanted to ensure that at launch there would not be any disparity of the handset made available to the customer. The phone will be available globally in May while the production of the phone will see a ramping up by the end of April.
North America and Canada will be among the first to receive the KEYone when the phone releases in May. It does make sense for the company to take its time to deliver to the masses a completely finished product as when the handset does come out, it will be competing with Android and iOS directly. Rushing to the market will just push an unfinished product to the audience who will not be able fully grasp its unique USP, which most notably, is its QWERTY keyboard.
Even the CEO of TCL, Steve Cistulli had the same to say about the delay, with the company hoping to meet demand. The Android phone will come with a 4.5-inch display, a 2GHz Snapdragon 625 processor, 3GB of RAM as well as 32GB of on-board storage with a microSD card for expansion up to 2TB. It will come with a 12MP camera on the rear as well as an 8MP camera on the front. Powering on everything will be a 3,505 mAh battery. The phone will also run with Android Nougat with Blackberry’s proprietary OS features.
What is unique about this phone is the fully flexible keyboard which has touch gesture support and also serves as a trackpad. There are also various shortcut keys for customization in order to create 52 customizable shortcuts. The spacebar will feature a fingerprint scanner and will come with a price tag of about $549 when it is released in the US. This is the phone that could probably make Blackberry’s comeback into the smartphone segment.