BlackBerry KEY2, after its launch last month in international markets, was launched in India on Monday by licensee Optiemus Infracom. It offers a Series 7 aluminium alloy frame, a textured diamond grip back panel, and a physical QWERTY keyboard that comes with certain intelligent shortcuts helping users launch apps and activate commands with the press of a single key. The KEY2 is the first BlackBerry-branded smartphone to sport a dual camera setup, and it incorporates features such as portrait mode and optical zoom.
The BlackBerry KEY2 price in India has been set at Rs. 42,990. It will go on sale exclusively via Amazon India from July 31, and comes bundled with Reliance Jio cashback offer of Rs. 4,450 and ICICI bank cashback offer. There will be additional launch benefits, the company said.
The smartphone is designed for the QWERTY keypad lovers that still exist, with all the latest specifications built-in. The back of the phone is made of textured plastic, and sports a horizontally-stacked dual camera setup, with the BlackBerry logo sitting in the rear centre. The 3.5mm audio jack sits on the top edge, while all the power and volume buttons are placed on the right-edge of the device. There's also a convenience 'Speed' key on the right edge that automatically opens any app that you set it to.
The dual-SIM (Nano) BlackBerry KEY2 runs Android 8.1 Oreo out-of-the-box, and sports a 4.5-inch full-HD (1080x1620 pixels) IPS LCD display with 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass, a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 433ppi, and 24-bit colour depth. The handset is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC (four Kryo 260 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and four clocked at 1.8GHz), combined with 6GB of RAM.
As for camera specifications, the BlackBerry KEY2 sports a horizontal dual camera setup with two 12-megapixel rear sensors that include Dual Tone LED flash, HDR, 4K video recording at 30FPS, and dual PDAF. The primary sensor has a FoV (Field of View) of 79.3 degrees, 1.28-micron pixels, and an f/1.8 aperture, while the secondary sensor has a 50-degree FoV, 1.0 micron pixels, and f/2.6 aperture. On the front, the smartphone gets an 8-megapixel fixed focus with screen flash and full-HD video recording.
The smartphone comes in 64GB and 128GB internal storage variants, expandable via microSD card (up to 256GB). Connectivity options on the BlackBerry KEY2 include 4G LTE (on both SIM cards), Wi-Fi 802.11ac (dual-band 2.4GHz, 5GHz), Bluetooth v5.0 LE, GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, NFC, FM radio, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and USB Type-C. A 3500mAh battery powers in the internals from underneath the hood, with Quick Charge 3.0 support, said to provide a mixed use battery life of over 25 hours. Sensors onboard the handset include accelerometer, ambient light sensor, gyroscope, hall effect sensor, fingerprint sensor (on spacebar key), magnetometer, and proximity sensor. Dimensions of the BlackBerry KEY2 are 151.4x71.8x8.5mm and weight is 168 grams.
DTEK by BlackBerry app now includes the new Proactive Health check feature. It also has the enhanced Convenience Key (called Speed Key by Optiemus), making it easier to access your most-used apps with custom profiles for at home, in the car, in a meeting or on the go.
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