Not so long ago, TCL confirmed that the BlackBerry KEYone will be available in the U.S. and Canada starting May 31.
The phone will be available for pre-orders in Canada starting May 18, but the official availability or rather shipping will begin two weeks later. At the time of making this confirmation, the Chinese OEM also mentioned that those in the UK – or those who can make a trip to London – can grab themselves a BlackBerry KEYone handset as at the time of this writing, but it appears the Chinese market will have to wait until July before receiving this same phone.
BlackBerry is a Canadian company, which kind of explains why the region will be among the first to see the KEYone – alongside the U.S. However, this phone was not manufactured by BlackBerry, rather, it is China’s TCL that took care of the hardware part. With this in mind, it was many people’s belief that the Chinese market will be among the first to start selling the BlackBerry KEYone, but this is not the case, according to the latest report.
This is not an official communication from either BlackBerry or TCL. Rather, it comes from the country’s Weibo, the leading microblogging platform in the Asian country and as such, don’t be surprised if there are changes to this alleged release date in future.
The BlackBerry KEYone is one of the most iconic phones you can find around. It ships with a compact 4.5-inch display screen with a Full HD resolution and a physical QWERTY keyboard that also houses a fingerprint scanner under the space bar. Under the hood, the handset has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC that is clocked at 2.0GHz and paired with a RAM of 3GB. The internal storage is 32GB, which can be expanded via a microSD card of up to 2TB.
Powering the BlackBerry KEYone is Android 7.1 Nougat alongside a decent 3505mAh battery unit. The camera specs include a powerful 12MP Sony IMX378 sensor on the back that supports features such as PDAF, dual-tone LED flash and up to 4x digital zoom. The front has an 8MP sensor for selfies.