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BlackBerry Mobile has a New QWERTY Phone in the Works

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 30 2017, @11:08PM   
from the notDead++ dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Several sites are reporting that BlackBerry Mobile seems to be prepping a new QWERTY phone after the modest success of the KEYone. From GSMarena:

The new BBF100-1 has a physical QWERTY keyboard too and it will keep the screen resolution of the Keyone, namely 1,080x1,620. It's unclear if the screen size will stay the same at 4.5", but it wouldn't be surprising if it did.

A clear upgrade will come in processing power, because the Keyone's successor will sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 chipset. It comes with a 2.2 GHz octa-core Kryo 260 CPU and the Adreno 512 GPU, along with the X12 LTE modem enabling up to 600Mbps peak download speeds and 150Mbps peak uploads. All in all, it should definitely provide better performance than the Snapdragon 625 inside the Keyone.

So not the Passport 2 many people have hoped for, but good news for the few still demanding a physical keyboard on their mobile devices. It seems that BlackBerry, or now TCL could do well just releasing updated models of a handful of devices every few years rather than brand new devices and formfactors every time.

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Original Submission

• Still way too much. Still way too much. (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:23AM (1 child)

  by Arik (4543) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:23AM (#589860) Journal

  I'm always looking for a decent phone and I abhor touch screens so I checked it out but it'll clearly be way more than I want. A qwerty keyboard on a phone is ridiculous. It's either just too small to use (typical blackberry) or it's way too big for a phone AND it's still really too small to be usable as well. And if you thought these things were a pain in the ass in daytime you should try it at night! The silly backlight drains your battery and kills your night vision but it's still not quite enough to really see with. Just awful all the way around. If you have to look at the keyboard that's not typing. I could text with T-9 without needing to take the phone out of my pocket.
  
  

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• Re:Still way too much. (Score: 2) by damnbunni on Tuesday October 31 2017, @12:22PM

  by damnbunni (704) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @12:22PM (#589977) Journal

  I have hands big enough to palm a bowling ball* and I can touch-type on a Blackberry Q10 without looking at the keys.

  Yes, they're tiny, but the contouring on them is absolutely genius.

  The Priv's keyboard isn't as well contoured. I haven't tried a KeyOne. (I'm getting a Gemini instead.)

  * Yes, literally. No, not a pro-bowler model. But an eight or ten pound ball, yeah.

  Parent