Blackberry Key2 - Hands On Review By Digital Trends

If, you told me two years ago that one of my favorite phones would be a blackberry with a physical keyboard. I'd have called you barking mad. Well here we are. This is the BlackBerry key -? It's the follow-up to last year's blackberry, key one which was widely successful and blackberry stuck to its guns here, focusing on privacy, security, battery life and overall great build quality, so we're checking out what makes this phone so great. This is the key to review, starting with design. Blackberry is trying to cater to a new audience, but the key to, but the key one.

They focused on getting the old BlackBerry fans with a nostalgia factor. So the phone looked a lot more like their previous phones with the key -. It looks more modern, professional sleek. You have less rounded corners. The sides are much more flat, they're, easier to grip and overall I think this phone looks a lot more professional and sleek.

The 4.5 inch display has moved up slightly, there's slimmer, bezels around the screen. The phone itself is much lighter about 12 grams lighter, and it's a millimeter thinner. So overall, this just feels much more comfortable to hold, and it fits in my hand really perfectly there are capacitive buttons right here that disappear when you're, not using them. The keyboard actually is much bigger than the key one. They got rid of those frets between the rows and the keys are not glossy they're mapped, they're, much bigger themselves if it's easier to type and the fingerprint sensor is embedded in the space bar there's also a new speed key here, which we'll get into a little more later over.

On the right side, you have the convenience key, the power button and the volume rocker, which are all pretty easy to access when you're holding the phone like this, and the nice touch is that the power key is textured. So it's very easy to tell which button is which, over on the back is its pretty drippy like last year? They now have dual cameras on the back 12 megapixels, each and over on the top. Is a headphone jack? Now we're a little annoyed that the headphone jack isn't set. I assume this is a mic right here or some other sensor, and the headphone jack, as you can see, is a little too low, but we're still happy that the headphone jack exists in the first place. It's not much here on the left edge, except for the SIM card slot, which also acts as a dual SIM slot in international markets and over on the bottom is a USB type-c charging port with speakers.

It's a mono speaker and that actually might be our the thing we like the least about the key to is that the speaker doesn't really get that loud and sometimes, since it's on the bottom, it can be a little hard to block, or it's easy to block I should say when you're holding the phone like this and listen to the floor watching videos, the BlackBerry key too may not have a flagship processor, but we haven't had really too many issues with performance. Furthermore, it's a snapdragon 616 with six gigs of ram, there are 64 gigs of storage. Internationally, you can get 128 gigs of storage. There is a micro SD card slot and right here, this 4.5 inch LCD is 16 20 by 1080p resolution. The display itself is sharp colorful, and it certainly gets bright enough to view outdoors.

We don't really have any problems with it and performance wise, like we mentioned you're, not going to have too many issues. Yes, you'll notice that apps don't open as quickly as say a phone with the snapdragon 845. Switching between apps isn't as fluid. Maybe there are some delays, sometimes especially when you're doing a lot of too many things at once, but I think most people will be relatively satisfied with the performance here, and it's more than capable. The BlackBerry q2 has a 3500 William power battery basically can say goodbye the battery anxiety with heavy use, with lots of video streaming and picture taking music streaming and all sorts of web surfing.

We ended a day, 7 p. m. with about 40% remaining. That means really don't have to worry about recharging this phone, that often on even lighter days when we're said at home, we ended the day with about 60% remaining. So really, who can't be happy with that camera on the q2 is pretty good.

There are 12 megapixels here, two of them photos are well detailed. The camera takes pictures relatively quickly. This fall showed a little with HDR. Sometimes the sky is a little too overexposed and white balance is sometimes an issue as well, because some colors don't look just bright, but I think most people will be happy with the taillight photos here. Camera app, isn't that fast to load we'd like to if it was a little faster and photos, also don't take pictures that quickly, but still it's pretty satisfactory.

It's its in low light mode. That thing is start to get a little complicated. A lot of grain starts to creep in, but we've noticed an issue that in low light, when you take a photo, sometimes the shutter stays on a little too long. So your photo almost always ends up a little blurry. You have to basically keep very still and of course this is in very low light, mid, mid low light.

It's its not bad, but a low light is where this phone suffers a little. There's also two times: optical zoom mode, that lets you get close to subjects it works best in daylight, but details seem to be a little fuzzy in any other lighting portrait mode. On the other hand, where the blur is around a subject actually looks pretty good, and we're surprised at how well it works. It is quick to snap and accurately Maps out all the edges of a subject. Blackberry q2 runs Android, 8.0, Oreo and black. We said it would push out to Android version updates, so it's definitely going to get Android P and hopefully, next year, they'll follow through and deliver Android Q software is mostly similar to stock Android.

This interface is very similar. There are, of course, some differences that Blackberry is added in general, it's pretty fluid with widgets that you can add one of the things that you can't customize and even remove. If you don't want it is this productivity tab, you can add widgets. Now that's new right here, there's calendar you can check out and your contacts as well, and you can customize it even further choosing the height of that little part where you pull it out the transparency and all sorts of different things. It's pretty handy, it's very similar to Samsung's edge panel that you pull out from the side.

One of our favorite features is the Locker app we've set two pressing and holding the L button. Basically, the locker app is a way to hide all your apps and content. You can access it with your fingerprint, and you can see a private photos that you take, for example, in this mode in the camera instead of using the normal shutter button, simply take a photo with the fingerprint sensor, and it'll populate up here in the locker app. So it's a nice secure way of taking some photos of files that you say you know, don't want other people to see or photos that you don't want people to see. The same can be said with private files that you add on to your phone.

You can hide them in here, and it comes pre-installed with Firefox Focus, which is a Firefox browser that basically hides all your content. So all your search habits, what you search for all sorts of things like that makes it very secure and private. So no one can really follow your browsing habits. Also, new is this power app power center, basically monitors your usage warns you! It actually learns your charging habit. So if it knows that you're gonna charge at night tonight- and you says- oh maybe you're- not gonna, you know reach that charging time.

It'll warn you say: hey, you should probably top up soon. Otherwise, you might not reach your charging time. It's using machine or machine learning to sort of identify that and figure that there's lots of settings here that you can use to tweak to sort of maximize your power and battery efficiency. On top of that, there's also privacy shade, which has been around for now for about a year. Basically, you can pull down with three fingers, or you can activate it right here in the settings toolbar.

Basically, this is to help avoid prying eyes, say if you're under the train, you can actually move this around so that if you want to sort of scan a sensitive document, other people will have a hard time seeing it's going to exit it pretty quickly. The keyboard is really one of our favorite features of this phone. You can add up to 52 shortcuts ? per letter, and it just makes everything so much faster rather than having to jump into the app drawer and find your app. For example, I've said em to launch Google, Maps and pressing and hold em will launch another app that I've set Facebook Messenger same thing is true, with almost every app you can of course, set what you want. You can even set things like actions and, for example, pressing an old G for me will launch a Google search action that I'm about to search, or you can just open the Google Search app and regular G for me is Gmail, let's just jump into a couple.

Others e, for example, is my Expensive app pressing and holding w is directly to voicemail and that's another thing you can set. You know direct speed dial to your contacts, a for a low, my messenger app, and it just makes everything so much more convenient. Now BlackBerry has added this new speed key, basically getting rid of that extra shift. Button speed key makes even things even faster to access so say, for example, I'm in my Maps app, and I'm say looking at this restaurant, and now I quickly want to jump back into my email app, for example. So what you do is press and hold the speed key and press the other app that you want to jump to that you've preset.

So, if I jump to I now, I can jump straight into Instagram. Now, if I want to go back to maps, I can just press and hold to speak and press M same is true, say if I want to go to Chrome and that's chrome right there. Basically, you know speed key works when you're in an app so say if I'm in photos and I want to jump into Instagram, because that's something that might actually I would do, and I can keep jumping back and forth, and it acts you know pretty fast. So that's the speed key. It certainly makes things a lot faster than traditional way of say.

You know going back and finding your app, whether it's on the home screen or on your app drawer, it's a genuine improvement, and it certainly makes multitasking really, really fast and that's where performance comes into play. We wish that it was a Snapdragon dated 45, because then the whole process would feel even faster, even more fluid, because, as you can see, there were some slowdown there. You know wasn't opening as quickly as we'd like still, though plenty satisfactory performance, and we haven't had too many issues so far. The convenience key on the side adds extra benefit as well. Basically, what you can now set three apps for three different types of modes.

For example, when the phone connects to your car's Bluetooth, you can set three different apps to launch when you press the button, and they'll sort of just float over ahead here. It's actually a little tough to show right now, because we're not connected to any Wi-Fi network but say, for example, with my work when I'm connected to my work, Wi-Fi, which you can tell it what your work fight is. These apps I've chosen will pop up when I press the convenience. Key same is true with my home profile. Currently, I've set it to connect to any Wi-Fi network.

So, for example, if I try to connect to something- let's just say, I try to connect to Flatiron free Wi-Fi. Let's try this and see how it works there. It is so basically I'm connected to any Wi-Fi right now, so I can have these apps launched with me as I want, if actually I found this key not to be as helpful as I thought. It might be because I've already set a lot of these apps to my keyboard. So it's really hard for me to come up with new apps or ways or things that I need to open in a handy way.

But of course there might be things that you might want to say if it's a game or something else, but that's how it'll work with whether you're connected to your work, Wi-Fi, car, Bluetooth or your home network, and of course you can also set it to sort of launch on any Wi-Fi network. So that's the convenience game. My barking mad yet seems like a good phone right and really the only two downsides that we have with the key two is that the performance and camera aren't as good as the flagship phones, they're still pretty good, though camera suffers just a little in low-light and performance should be more than satisfactory for most people and the rest of the package is just too good to be true. You have almost two day battery life, fantastic keyboard, good design, good, build quality, solid screen, simple software and just a lot of features in there that make this phone fun to use and very useful. So that's the key to it.

Cost six hundred and fifty dollars, it's gonna, be working on AT&T and T-Mobile Networks at launch, and currently it has no support for Sprint and Verizon. But it'll likely come later this summer, though we're not sure yet so again, you should totally buy and get the BlackBerry to.

Source : Digital Trends