Someone at BlackBerry and TCL has been watching too much Game of Thrones. At least that is the impression you get when you meet BlackBerry’s latest smartphone running Android which has no name.
The nameless BlackBerry is what we have been referring to as ‘Mercury’, its reported internal pre-release codename and what many anticipated would end up being known as the DTEK70 much in line with existing BlackBerry Android smartphones from the last few months.
Names aside, as expected, the new BlackBerry features one of the company’s signature features, a physical keyboard that incorporates a trackpad. Unlike the Priv, BlackBerry’s other Android smartphone with a physical keyboard, the keyboard on the new smartphone is fixed. It is not flexible. The space bar on the keyboard has a fingerprint sensor embedded for tasks like unlocking the device.
To further cement its newness, the new BlackBerry arrives running on Android Nougat.
The device also happens to be the first one to be made by TCL, the Chinese device maker that BlackBerry has outsourced its smartphone-building operations to.
The new BlackBerry smartphone is not immediately available for sale (the unit being showcased at CES is a pre-production one) and details of its pricing and availability are as scarce as the device’s spec sheet itself which is understandable at this point since it’s just a preview. It’s not just the name that is a mystery. One thing is for certain, though: it sure does look very good.
TCL is promising more details at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. We’ll find out more about ‘Mercury’ then, we suppose.
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