Blackberry KEYone: solid Android with buttons – Wylsacom || Blackberry keyone android pay

⇡#Specifications

⇡#Design and ergonomics

The Blackberry KEYone is the latest Canadian-designed smartphone without Chinese influence. It’s hard to say what the “blackberry” gadgets will turn into when they are completely created in the depths of TCL, but the breed is definitely felt in the KEYone. This is a really beautiful device – and I would not say that retronotes play a key role in the feelings that a smartphone evokes.

An important role in this impression is played by the simple fact that Blackberry simply abandoned the attempt to make a really compact gadget: the thickness of the case is 9.4 mm; thin bezels around the display – oh well, let Samsung and Apple butt heads. In addition, the silver-black gamma is a real classic. Here we have a solid smartphone for respectable gentlemen.

In addition to the mentioned silver-black version, there is also (but not yet in Russia) a completely black KEYone. Not too playful either.

BlackBerry KEYone, front panel: above the screen – earpiece, front camera, status indicator and light sensor (yes, that’s a big one); below the screen – three Android touch navigation keys and a physical QWERTY keyboard

The case is only partially made of metal and glass: the keyboard is made of glossy plastic (which does not leave fingerprints), and the back is covered with a rubberized plastic panel. It doesn’t sound very good, but visually and tactilely it is perceived again perfectly. Moreover, this is the rarest smartphone that does not strive to slip out of your hand at all: here both the thickness helps and the tenacious texture of the back panel. One hand to use Blackberry KEYone, by the way, you can without the slightest problem.

BlackBerry KEYone, rear panel: in the upper left corner – the main camera lens and two LED flashes

We will talk about the keyboard separately, but the manufacturer did not manage to include it in the list of KEYone control features. Along with the standard hardware power and volume keys, another programmable one fits on the right edge. There you can hang almost any function of the smartphone at your discretion – including quick access to any installed application.

BlackBerry KEYone, top: additional microphone and mini-jack

BlackBerry KEYone, bottom: USB Type-C port and two decorative grilles, the speaker is hidden behind the right one

On the top edge there is a mini-jack, on the bottom there is a USB Type-C port and a speaker. The front glass is slightly bent at the edges – but this is the tempered Gorilla Glass 4 covering the screen, the display itself is flat. Blackberry claims that this glass is very resistant to a variety of mechanical damage – and this is true.

BlackBerry KEYone, left side: power key

BlackBerry KEYone, right side: slot for SIM card and memory card, volume key and programmable button

But it also cannot show off something big – the device is not waterproof and dustproof, despite its brutal image.

⇡#Keyboard

Of course, this is not the first Android smartphone with a physical keyboard – don’t forget the Passport and Priv (we reviewed it). Blackberry did not reinvent the keyboard on the smartphone in KEYone – it has the same layout as on the Priv, and the same four-row structure. At the same time, the keys themselves have been redesigned (the shape has changed; they protrude more above the body) and, most importantly, they are now built not into a flimsy sliding slider module, but into a monolithic body. You can press it safely, and the return is very pleasant.

Printing is very fast. Yes, I know colleagues who write articles on ordinary smartphones, spitting on physical feedback, but blind typing on the on-screen keyboard is practically impossible – here you can get used to it. Of the features – the need to constantly use Alt to enter numbers and additional characters.

There is a backlight – I already mentioned it at the beginning. Moreover, in the Russian version – two-color: Latin is highlighted in white, Cyrillic – in orange. Of course, no one began to completely remake the keyboard for Cyrillic – the process is laborious, and, in fact, meaningless. Therefore, some letters are bridged by two on the key – the choice is made by double-clicking.

Another feature of the keyboard of the new Blackberry, also carried over from the Priv, is its built-in capacitive sensor. It recognizes standard multi-touch gestures like swipe, two-finger photo zoom and vertical scrolling – all of which are relevant not only for the interface and basic programs, but also for any applications downloaded from Google Play. In addition, with the help of these movements, you can control what you have written, erasing, for example, words by moving your finger across the keyboard.

⇡#Software

Android may be inferior to Windows in terms of the number of virus attacks, but there is a complete feeling that this gap will gradually come to naught. When working with a smartphone, you have to be as careful as when working on a desktop computer. Blackberry is a company that, almost from the day it was founded, has been oriented towards “paranoids” and people who really need normal encryption – businessmen and top managers.

The developers claim that they have finalized the Linux kernel itself. Without details, but it seems like on KEYone “the most secure Android”. We cannot verify this. Another thing is the loading of the system: when turned on, it is checked whether there are any changes in the firmware, whether there is “extra”, whether the user has installed (often without knowing it) an alternative firmware.

The same DTEK program monitors the access rights of various applications and informs (and also blocks it on its own) if some program wants something extra. DTEK worked quite successfully for me, demonstrating confident “green checkmarks” in all the necessary fields. But one of the colleagues, who took the device for a test from Blackberry itself, the application claimed that only the unpacked phone had non-original firmware;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https:accounts.google.comServiceLogin

But, by the way, access using a PIN code, pattern or fingerprint is non-disableable, here KEYone allows itself to instruct users. Probably right.

Enough of the branded shell and other features. First, Blackberry Hub is a service that collects all messages and notifications from a variety of applications. Secondly, the “Productivity Tab” is a tab on the right edge of the screen that collects various messages, tasks for the day, and so on.

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Visually, the shell differs from the original Android not too much. I will note several types of menus for open applications and the fact that the Blackberry Launcher does not touch the status bar and icons at all – well done. The shell works quickly, and at first I generally wanted to fill this section completely with honey – it was really pleasant to use KEYone.

But after about a week and a half, a fly in the ointment also accumulated – a variety of errors began to regularly break through: either an application would freeze for no reason, then the device would arbitrarily go into a reboot from scratch, then it would start to slow down the browser. Unfortunately, the Blackberry KEYone cannot guarantee the impeccable stability that is so necessary for a business smartphone – and this is perhaps its main failure.

⇡#Display and sound

The Blackberry KEYone is old school not only in terms of physical keys, but also in terms of size. 4.5 inches is even less than the iPhone 7/8 (but more than the iPhone SE!). This is dictated, however, not by concern for users who suffer in the world of hefty “shovels”, but by the unwillingness to turn their smartphone into the master of these “shovels”. Since we decided to give part of the case for the keyboard, we had to cut off a little from the screen.

This display has a very fashionable feature – a non-standard aspect ratio. But this, of course, is not 18:9, your eyesight does not deceive you, but 3:2. The resolution corresponds – this is a “cropped” Full HD, 1620 × 1080. The pixel density is 431 ppi – a very worthy indicator. There is no reason to complain about the fact that Blackberry was greedy and did not put a Quad HD display on its flagship – it is useless here.

The screen, like the keyboard, has a capacitive touch that supports multi-touch gestures – up to 10 simultaneous touches. The oleophobic coating is very effective, the screen hardly collects fingerprints. An IPS-matrix is ​​used, which gives decent viewing angles. However, they are not brilliant – at a deviation of about 40 degrees or more, the contrast drops, but the colors are not distorted.

Measured brightness without activating automatic adjustment to ambient light – 548 cd/m2. A very good indicator, which, in combination with a polarizing layer, allows you to safely use your smartphone in any lighting conditions. If you activate the brightness adjustment, then the peak figure will completely exceed 600 cd / m2.

The contrast ratio is 1422:1. Here, the KEYone’s display again performs very well – the blacks in the photo and video are quite deep, you don’t have to deal exclusively with grayscale.

BlackBerry KEYone, gamma. Yellow line – KEYone indicators, dotted line – reference gamma

But the default screen of Blackberry KEYone is mediocre. The average gamma value is 2.61. This is already far from the norm, but pay attention to the gamma curves rushing into space on light shades – they are not good at all.

BlackBerry KEYone, color temperature. Blue line – KEYone readings, dotted line – reference temperature

The average color temperature fluctuates around 8,500-9,000 K. As a result, we see cold shades on the screen. Yes, the eye perceives this well, but this has nothing to do with honest color reproduction.

If you wish, however, you can adjust the temperature in the settings – this is the only screen parameter, except for brightness, that can be changed manually.

BlackBerry KEYone, color gamut. Gray triangle – sRGB coverage, white triangle – KEYone coverage

The average DeltaE deviation on the Color Checker scale, which includes both a wide range of colors and shades of gray, was 6.23 – also a figure far from normal. Alas, the KEYone display cannot boast of high-quality color reproduction.

But the Blackberry KEYone got its own mini-jack. Since the fall of 2016, every time you meet a fresh smartphone, you first of all look at this line in the specifications. Well, or on the side faces, if you twirl in your hands. More and more companies are following Apple – but Blackberry is not doing it yet.

Wired headphones can be connected without an adapter and get a very good sound quality. The power reserve is enough to block the external noise in the transport at maximum volume. There is no special detail and depth of sound here – the usual smooth picture without obvious failures. You can listen to music, but this is not a music lover’s smartphone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytcreatorsru

The speaker here is monophonic, hidden behind the grille to the right of the USB Type-C port. The left one is decorative. The volume is a little lacking – in a noisy place, you can miss a call. The speaker, as well as the microphone, did not cause complaints, it was comfortable to speak using the KEYone.

⇡#Hardware and performance

The weak point of the Blackberry KEYone is the hardware platform. Here, the manufacturer decided to frankly save money and installed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 system-on-chip on a smartphone worth 40 thousand rubles. This is a good middle-class solution, but it was used in inexpensive devices last year. Today you can find smartphones for less than 10 thousand rubles with it on board – for example, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X.

Snapdragon 625 consists of eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2GHz and Adreno 506 graphics subsystem with a theoretical frequency of 650MHz. The platform is produced on a 14-nm process technology.

3 GB of RAM is allocated to the system-on-a-chip. This combination allows you to use your smartphone without any problems – unless, of course, you count on the maximum smoothness of work and do not like to play mobile games with extreme graphic settings. I would like to say here about the stability of the KEYone hardware, but this will not be entirely true – the poorly optimized shell should also be blamed.

Flash memory in KEYone 32 GB, but the capacity can be increased with a microSD memory card with a theoretical capacity of up to 2 TB. The Black Edition version carries 64 GB of non-volatile memory and 4 GB of RAM on board, but is not yet officially sold in Russia.

To be honest, everything related to the technical stuffing of the Blackberry KEYone causes slight bewilderment. Yes, power is not the main thing for this smartphone, but look at these gaps in the benchmark results. I don’t even know what could be more eloquent. By the way, one of our traditional tests, Geekbench version 4, refused to run in full – also a rarity with a minus sign.

⇡#Communication and wireless communications

The Blackberry KEYone still has Canadian roots, and as a result there are inevitable analogies with Apple. Unfortunately, in the international (aka Russian) version, there is only one slot for a nano-SIM SIM card. I would like to write a standard one about the need to sacrifice a second SIM card for the sake of expanding memory using a memory card, but this is not about KEYone either: there is only one SIM card and one microSD.

KEYone is 4G friendly – LTE Cat.9 is supported with a theoretical download speed of 450 Mbps. These are quite relevant characteristics – at least in the coming years, a sharp jump in speed from base stations should not be expected, even if 5G and 4.5G are not far off.

A set of other wireless modules includes NFC with Android Pay support, Bluetooth 4.2 (no mention of aptX support) and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. And there is no K-port.

BlackBerry KEYone, AndroiTS GPS Test results

Navigation module supports connection with GPS (A-GPS), GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo satellites. It works very quickly and accurately, there are no questions about KEYone navigation.

⇡#Camera

Blackberry in KEYone uses the well-deserved Sony IMX378 module: 12 megapixels, single pixel size – 1.55 microns. Lens aperture – ƒ / 2.0. It is interesting that, despite the very thick body, the camera still protrudes above it. Such is the engineering case. Or is it meant to be?

The camera uses a phase focusing method with sensors placed directly on the matrix. The contrast method seems to be definitively a thing of the past. Be that as it may, the KEYone focuses quite confidently – there are no serious complaints about speed (even in the dark), the accuracy is also quite stable.

BlackBerry KEYone Camera Application Interface

The camera application is non-standard – its developers also did not take from Google, but decided to make their own. In my opinion, in vain. It seems that there are no frankly bad decisions in the interface, but, for example, adjusting the exposure not with a strip near the focus area, but with a swipe across the display causes some dissonance. There is a set of filters, a “professional” mode with many manual settings, as well as automatic merging of HDR and panoramas.

Partial panorama example

Panoramas are implemented in a strange way – you can glue them together only by holding the smartphone in portrait orientation. By the way, by default, all photos are taken in 3:2 format, despite the fact that the sensor itself has a 4:3 format.

Left – picture without HDR, right – with HDR

The quality of the KEYone does not disappoint, but it does not impress either. Here is a good HDR mode, in which the device does not go over with saturation. I don’t want to turn it off, and there’s no need – the speed of work hardly suffers. The dynamic range of the shots is decent – and with disabled HDR too. I was very pleased with the color rendition and well-exposed white balance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytdevru

There are no problems with detailing either. The camera’s ability to shoot at night was not impressive: you can shoot on the KEYone in low light, but due to the lack of optical stabilization, the electronics are forced to set shutter speeds shorter and raise the ISO. For a mobile camera, there are large pixels (the same sensor is installed, I remind you, in Google Pixel), but everything is relative, and this too – the noise is still very serious.

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Blackberry KEYone can shoot video in 4K resolution at up to 30 frames per second.

Front camera – 8 megapixels, ƒ/2.0, fixed focus. There is no flash, but you can highlight the face with the screen. An absolute classic, but the quality of the pictures is quite decent. First of all, I liked the well-chosen viewing angle – optical distortions are not too significant. Well, with the color rendition, again, the order.

⇡#Offline work

The BlackBerry KEYone uses a very unusual battery for mobile devices. This is a conventional lithium-ion cell, but the voltage is not the usual 3.8 V, but 4.4 V. .4 Wh A very decent figure, especially for a smartphone with a 4.5-inch display.

But again, the mediocre optimization of the shell makes itself felt – KEYone does not set records for the duration of the work. This is a typical modern smartphone that needs to be charged strictly every day. Yes, even with extreme loads, it will last a working day, but it’s better not to count on something more.

In our traditional test with HD video playback at maximum brightness, with the wireless connection turned on with the latest updates, the KEYone lasted 15 hours. In the complex PCMark Work 2.0 test, the result of the BlackBerry smartphone is exactly 7 hours. Very worthy. It is worth mentioning that fast charging is supported with a bundled charger or any other that would be friends with Qualcomm Quick Charge. It will take approximately two hours to fully charge the large battery.

⇡#Conclusion

BlackBerry KEYone is definitely one of the most interesting, unusual and attractive due to its dissimilarity to other smartphones. Personally, I fell in love with him literally from the first minutes – excellent build quality, a very pleasant, thoroughbred design, an excellently executed physical keyboard with a bunch of shortcut keys and some kind of nobility that is hard to describe. Smartphone for gentlemen.

But the first charm breaks against the harsh reality. Firstly, this is the weakest smartphone in its price category in terms of filling – and by a very large margin from the second place from the end. Snapdragon 625 3 GB of RAM 32 GB of permanent memory – this is not serious. Secondly, the software left a very controversial impression.

In theory, it should give at least a special feeling from working with the device, and as a maximum – maximum security. There is nothing to say about security (except that updates really arrive on the KEYone all the time), but the sensations were not very pleasing. Daily technical problems appeared from the beginning of the second week of use and did not disappear until the very end of testing. One can hope that the platform will be “finished”, everything will be fixed, and these are childhood illnesses … But this is only a shaky hope.

Otherwise, this is quite a pleasant device – with a decent (but nothing more) camera, ordinary autonomy, despite a very capacious battery, well protected from damage, but suffering from inaccurate colors and a small display.

Advantages:

• great physical QWERTY keyboard;
• thoroughbred design and excellent workmanship;
• declared high level of safety;
• abundance of shortcut keys;
• good shooting quality in normal lighting conditions;
• non-standard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytaboutru

Weaknesses:

• mediocre hardware;
• unstable operation of the software shell;
• one SIM card;
• small and poorly tuned display;
• high price.