Nother CarGuy

MWC is finally upon us and Blackberry is ready to let us in on all the details. Without further ado, meet the BlackBerry KEYone. Everyone remembers the BlackBerry phones with their distinctive design and QWERTY keyboards but as the industry moved to touchscreens, BlackBerry failed to remain relevant on the market and that led it into a downward spiral, which unfolded over the course of several years. In the end, the company had no other choice but to sell the device business to another manufacturer and focus on software instead. The new smartphone we see today is perhaps the last device developed by BlackBerry before TCL Communication took over as the owner of the BlackBerry brand. You might recognize them as the Chinese manufacturer behind the Alcatel phones. This certainly explains why the KEYone is not yet another re-badged Alcatel phone. Instead, it returns to the BlackBerry roots and offers a true hardware keyboard. The BlackBerry KEYone has a 4.5” display with a resolu...

One of BlackBerry's top sales executives says the company will release a new smartphone with its distinctive physical keyboard within six months. The comment was made in a BBC video interview published Wednesday, a week after the Canadian smartphone pioneer announced it would stop doing hardware development in-house. Instead, it said it would rely on partners to produce BlackBerry devices. It's been an open secret that BlackBerry has at least one more smartphone with a keyboard that hasn't been released. But chairman and CEO John Chen said last week that he hadn't decided whether it would be brought to market. The company's senior vice-president for global device sales, Alex Thurber, was less vague in his interview with BBC. "There will still be a keyboard-based BlackBerry device, designed and distributed within the next six months," he said. Thurber said that the keyboards set BlackBerrys apart from market-leading Apple and Samsung smar...