The all new KEYone proves that BlackBerry still got a chance!

Over the past seven years, BlackBerry’s market share has slipped away, lost to Apple and Android. The company made multiple attempts to revive its own fortunes, from its oft-delayed BB 10 operating system to devices like the Z10 and Passport. Nothing stuck, including the company’s first attempt to combine a hardware keyboard and the Android operating system, the BlackBerry Priv.

After first being revealed at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, the new device was officially put up for sale in the UK earlier this week. London’s Selfridges is the only place you can currently buy the BlackBerry KEYone, with the famous old department store having an exclusive until May 5th, when Carphone Warehouse will also start selling the device.

The KeyOne runs Android Nougat 7.1.1 and uses a Snapdragon 625 SoC. That’s an eight-core CPU clocked at 2GHz (all eight cores are based on the Cortex-A53). Performance when running single-threaded code will not be particularly strong, since the Cortex-A53 is intended for low power consumption, but eight cores should give it reasonable juice with multithreaded code. The KeyOne has 3GB of RAM, a 3505mAh battery, a 12MP back camera capable of 4K capture with digital image stabilization, and an 8MP, 1080p front camera. It offers 32GB of storage and can be expanded with up to 2TB from a microSD card, if and when such voluminous capacities become available.

As the name and photos imply, the KeyOne also features a physical keyboard — BlackBerry’s last farewell to the stalwart fans that have stuck by the company through thick and thin. According to all three sites, the KeyOne feels more like a BlackBerry than any of the DTEK rebrands it launched last year. Everyone complimented the fit and finish of the device and compared it positively with the Priv, whose form factor and overall size profile were not well-regarded (that’s the opinion of the various reviewers, not myself). PCMag notes that the physical keyboard is “full of cool tricks,” with a fingerprint scanner built into the spacebar and the ability to assign shortcuts to custom keys. The speaker and earpiece audio quality also got top marks, and the KeyOne supports Bluetooth 4.2, the most current version of the standard.

For starters, it seems that the BlackBerry KEYone is setting itself up to be something truly different from everything else around today. “We're very proud of the BlackBerry brand,” Johnathan Young, BlackBerry’s Mobile’s UK Country Manager, told Express.co.uk at the KEYone launch event.

The KEYone is certainly a visual departure from past BlackBerry devices, with a glamorous new all-metal build. The front of the device also now combines the company’s iconic QWERTY keyboard with a touchscreen, meaning users get the best of both worlds.

BlackBerry is also keen to highlight the software included in its new device, particularly the DTEK security tools. The company says that the KEYone is right up there with the most secure smartphones available today, with the advanced DTEK software combined with encryption built in to the device’s hardware itself.

So if you’ve long hoped the company would deliver one last solid product before its hardware designers exited stage left, your patience has been rewarded.