BlackBerry Key2 LE Review | Is It Worth the Price? By Gadgets 360

The BlackBerry key to Ellie is a more affordable version of the key to which launched earlier this year. If you look at it be only in terms of hardware and specifications, even this price might seem unreasonable, and you can find evenly matched phones in the market at half as much or less. The value of this phone comes entirely from its physical keyboard and the BlackBerry software. But are these factors good enough to outweigh everything else, and who should even really buy one of these phones in 2018? We have all the answers. The BlackBerry key to Ellie has the overall proportions of a current day smartphone, but obviously the keyboard at the bottom means that the screen isn't the usual shape or size. The borders above and below the screen are also quite thick by today's standards.

There are even capacitive Android navigation buttons between the screen and keyboard, all of which feels wasteful. Of course, the main attraction is the keyboard, and if that's, what you're here for you'll, forgive all other shortcomings. The keyboard is pretty much exactly what we encountered on last year's key one with the standard for Oh blackberry layout, with the same vertically compressed design. Purists will notice that the right shift button has been replaced with one that has a grid of nine dots. This is what's called the speed key and, in short, it lets.

You use the home screen shortcuts assigned to each alphabet's key from within any app, even if you're in the middle of typing something it's changed, that the shift key was dropped. Considering that there's blank space on either side of the bottom keyboard, robe, just like with the key one, a fingerprint reader has been embedded into the space bar. It makes a lot of sense, and it's natural for us to place a finger there to unlock this phone. We also kept hitting the space bar as if it was a home button which it isn't on the downside. This models reduction in price means that the keyboard is in touch sensitive.

As for typing comfort, the keyboard is very good. Although blackberry is in manufacturing this phone itself, the distinctive keyboard quality has not been lost. As far as Hardware quality goes, the rest of the BlackBerry key 2 is also quite interesting. The entire back has a texture, that's meant to improve grip, but it doesn't do much for aesthetics. In fact, it makes this phone look rather odd and toy-like similar to the key one and key to this phone's overall shape is rounded on the bottom and flat on done.

It's subtle, though, which we think people will like the key to is comfortable to hold and use for typing and for general productivity. The 4.5-inch screen has a 3 is to 2 aspect ratios and a resolution of 1080 by 1620. The pixel density is 434 PPI, which is quite impressive, but colors are a little washed out screens. This small is now unusual, and we found that it was easy to reach all corners of it with one comp. The flip side of this is that using landscape mode, especially when gaming with both thumbs on the screen, is quite awkward.

Unfortunately, there's a hybrid dual SIM tray, which means choosing between more storage and a second cell, 4G and LTE, are both supported. Blackberry phones. Over the past few years have not been known for being both powerful and affordable, and this one is no different. The processor is a fairly powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 636, but we've seen it in phones that cost roughly one third as much most, notably the Asus before max pro m1, which starts at ten thousand 999 rupees. There's 4gb of RAM and 64gb of storage, which you can bump up by 256 GB using a micros card, the key to Ellie runs Android 8.1 and our unit was running. The October 2018 security patch BlackBerry's customizations, run deep beginning with the useful ability to swipe up or down on home screen icons to pull up widgets for those apps.

Androids contextual menus have been given large shortcut icons, which we think is a great idea. Each keyboard key can be given a long press and a short press shortcut for a total of 52 possible actions. These are what you can trigger from within apps. Using the new speed key. These shortcuts can also be pinned to the home screen as icons.

Security is a huge selling point for blackberry. The DJ app is a security dashboard, but a lot of what it shows are standard, Android functions. DAC gives you a nice overview of what your phone is doing, but it doesn't seem to do much itself. Power center does much the same for power related settings such as the screen, timeout and adaptive brightness, and it shows you which apps are consuming the most power. The locker app is more interesting because it gives you private instances of your own photo gallery: file, storage, location, web browser and apps of your own choosing the BlackBerry hub isn't as tightly integrated as it was when first distributed with BlackBerry's bb10 OS.

It takes the form of an app that unifies your email, I'm doing accounts. You can quickly sort and filter messages and use keyboard shortcuts to reply, people who find themselves drowning an email every day might benefit from this app blackberry also has its own calendar tasks, contacts and device search, apps password keeper does exactly what it sounds like privacy shade lets. You dim the screen, except for a small movable area that you control with your finger, so beeping terms have a hard time. Looking over your shoulder, redactor is a similar tool that lets you black out parts of screenshots before you share them. If you're thinking that the high cost of this hardware might be worth it because of the software, keep in mind that most of BlackBerry's apps, including the BlackBerry launcher, are now available to users of all Android phones.

You'll have to put up with ads or pay a small subscription fee of 65 rupees per month on non BlackBerry devices living with the BlackBerry. He, too, might require a few compromises. The apps we used all seemed to scale well enough to the short squarish screen, including games such as p avg and asphalt.9 legends asphalt, detected the keyboard and assumed this was our primary form of control, which of course, didn't work well in landscape mode. The BlackBerry key to LE tries to combine the benefits of physical keyboard keys and a touchscreen, but the integration is very messy. You get a row of autocomplete suggestions and some shortcuts on screen, but the row of capacitive navigation buttons is between the keyboard and screen.

The on-screen component sometimes expands to five full rows, such as, when you press the symbol button to show a number pad and punctuation of those on-screen. When trying to dismiss this, we wound up instead cycling through different views, including a full on-screen QWERTY keyboard that shouldn't even exist. This obviously isn't the best phone for watching videos on, but the screen and the single speaker are good enough for casual and Taylor. General usage is phones with no problems. The fingerprint sensor is snappy, and if you want to use face recognition, you can use androids trusted face feature.

The battery capacity is 3000, my and Qualcomm quick charge.3 is supported. You get an 1800 charger in the box to take advantage of that. Our HD video loop test ran for a very disappointing 8 hours, 20 minutes, but we fared better with real world use. The key to Kelly's battery still had about 20% left after around 15 hours of real-world usage, so it should easily be able to get through a heavy working day. The primary rear camera has a 13 megapixel sensor and f 2.2 aperture, while the secondary 5 megapixel depth sensor has a poorer, f, 2.4, aperture PDF is supported, and you get a portrait mode. You can record 4k video at up to 30 FPS, but there's no sign of stabilization.

The front 8 megapixel camera has a fixed focus and there's a screen flash option in the app camera quality was not impressive. First, the app is a little odd. It takes three taps to record video and a dive into the settings menu to display manual controls on screen. You can hit the space bar to capture a photo which is convenient, but if you tap the fingerprint sensor, a photo will be captured directly to your secure, lock or apps gallery and can't be found in the Google Photos app with no warning. We encountered a bit of shutter lag, and we also saw that the phone had trouble, locking focus on occasion.

A lot of the photos we took in the daytime actually came out looking good with rich colors and decent reproduction of details. Bright areas tended to be overexposed, but overall the results are satisfactory. The both effect in portrait mode was also quite good. You might not get every spontaneous shot that you want, but posed, and still subjects will be fine. At night there was a bit of motion blurring and a lot of shots were just money and black with very little even visible.

It was hard to focus on subjects, and we didn't get much use out of this camera at all videos decent, but nothing to get excited about the slow motion mode produced extremely poor quality video as we go through each feature and capability of the BlackBerry key 2 LE. In turn, we see that they are all good enough for a phone at the 10,000 to 15,000 repeat price level, but not if you are spending 30,000, rupees sure, a blackberry phone with a physical keyboard and productivity software should come at a bit of a premium, but a 2 to 3 times. Price gap is far too wide. We don't think it's really a fair trade-off, and it overshadows every good thing about this forum by this point in 2018, even hardcore BlackBerry fans and enthusiasts will have at least tried out a touchscreen phone unless you are utterly and completely certain. By now that you still need a physical keyboard, the key to LE is not the best use of your money.

The most of these competitors to this phone are the ASUS before 5 z and the Poco f1, both of which sell for well under 30,000 rupees. You can also save quite a bit of money by going for a low-end, Android phone and just subscribing to blackberry suite of apps. That was our review of the new BlackBerry key to Ellie, thanks for watching and for all things. Tech do visit us at gadget, 360, calm,.

Source : Gadgets 360