CES 2022: Hands On with BlackBerry Mercury

The BlackBerry Mercury isn't a 'real' smartphone yet. It hasn't been announced and, oddly, it doesn't even have a proper name. Nonetheless, TCL started showing it off today at CES, and it'south looking good, keyboard and all.

The BlacBerry Mercury, which has been leaked "nigh 600 times," according to TCL Communication Due north America President, Steve Cistulli, is the new Google Android-powered smartphone running BlackBerry's software stack with the archetype keyboard, complete with silvery frets between the rows.

TCL, which made the 2 previous BlackBerry-named handsets, the BlackBerry DTEK50 and DTEK60, is finally taking over BlackBerry'south handset marketing and sales operation. This can but be practiced for the brand in Due north America. Sales of BlackBerry devices in the US take dropped to basically zero as carriers didn't option them up.

TCL, on the other hand, has stiff relationships with carriers through its Alcatel sub-brand and information technology'll be marketing the BlackBerry Mercury to all four major networks in the U.s.a., Cistulli said.

"We're going to create a portfolio of BlackBerry handsets that has an evolutionary path into the future. Of course, nosotros will sell into carrier channels and the enterprise space. We're going to exist there in 2022, 2022, and across," Cistulli said.

Are they TCL phones or BlackBerry phones?

If anything, they're both, but they aren't Alcatel at the same time. BlackBerry is now a brand under the TCL custodianship, like Alcatel but parallel to it. "The good news is that BlackBerry [the software company] is very much involved in software evolution," Cistulli noted.

Only How Does it Feel?

Cistulli wanted to brand information technology articulate that the handset I am handling isn't final hardware, and he didn't desire to tell me the specs. So, I kind of puzzled some things out.

The BlackBerry Mercury has a big photographic camera lens on the dorsum and a USB Type-C port on the bottom. It's a single SIM phone, with a microSD carte du jour slot likewise. The unit I had looked at ran Android vii.0 Nougat and had 32GB of storage (about 24GB available) and 3GB of RAM. I took a few photos with the camera, confirming that it focused well and rapidly.

The LCD screen is of an appropriate attribute ratio for Google Android, so at that place won't be app compatibility issues.

CrackBerry said the BlackBarry Mercury has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, a 3,400mAh bombardment, and 18MP and 8MP cameras, simply TCL declined to confirm or deny.

You desire to know almost the keyboard, of course. The keys are angled, to make them easier to blazon on. They feel a little wobbly and could have been tightened still. The keyboard is capacitive, like the ane on the BlackBerry Passport, letting yous swipe back and along across it to use it equally pointer keys. The space bar doubles as a fingerprint scanner and that, personally, is a really cool impact.

Typing on the keyboard is a little bit deliberate. It's been a while since I used a smartphone with a hard keyboard, and in the 10 minutes I had, I didn't have time to get accepted to it. Equally is, I missed a few letters past not pressing hard enough. Cistulli said the keyboard "is nonetheless a little bit of a work in progress."

We'll hear more than well-nigh the BlackBerry Mercury in February 2022.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/mobile-phones/13098/ces-2017-hands-on-with-blackberry-mercury

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