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Mobile World Congress this year has been led by headlines around comebacks, one of the biggest being the return of BlackBerry’s physical keyboard.
Housed on the new KEYone, the new BlackBerry device made by TCL Communication, this is a rare combination of Android touchscreen and actual keys beneath it.
Intriguing in prospect, but what about when you come face-to-face with it?
The answer is actually positive overall – for all the troubles BlackBerry have had with their devices in recent years, TCL appears to have found a recipe that might just draw some consumers back to BlackBerry.
In the flesh, the KEYone is a smart looking device – the keyboard doesn’t look as out of place as you may think, and it’s big enough to type on comfortably.
The device itself is thicker than some other flagship phones of the time but there’s still a nice weight and comfort in the hand to the KEYone. It feels bulky but that doesn’t seem wrong here because it isn’t trying to be a sleek fashion accessory.
The large camera sensor and use of brushed metal emphasises this point, but this is far from an ugly phone.
On-screen too the Android interface isn’t cramped or overshadowed by the keyboard either, while the touch sensitivity of the keyboard means you can swipe on that as well as the screen and in a sense adds more space to the front of the KEYone.
It’s a pleasing first encounter with a phone that was slightly overshadowed by Nokia’s big comeback at MWC, but it’s not all plain sailing.
The KEYone does have one very big issue and that is the price. £499 is a lot of money for a such a phone. The KEYone clearly has more of a business target audience but that doesn’t mean it can’t appeal to every day users.
However, at that price it may struggle to keep potential users interested.
Which is a shame because on first impressions there’s more to this phone than you might expect – it’s not a gimmick designed just to get people talking about BlackBerry again, it’s a phone consumers should be talking about because of the promise it has.
