Blackberry Key2 review: 6 features to try By CNET

This is the BlackBerry key ? I've put my sim card in I've, been using it as my primary phone for a couple of weeks, and I've got a lot to say about it. So fire away, my favorite thing by far, would be the shortcuts from the keyboard. You can short press or long press any key to give you up to 52 shortcuts, so I, just press n and my Notes app pops up, I press, C and Chrome pops up. It's really convenient I think it's actually more convenient than shortcuts on pretty much any other phone, pretty much everything else just kidding. There are some kinks that the company has to work out, because there are some apps that still call up the virtual keyboard, even though you have the physical keyboard right below, so it shrinks the size of your app and what you can see on the screen, ? like the top quarter or top third and that kind of defeats the purpose of having a physical keyboard. Also, from all that typing, my thumbs are pretty sword the key to completely updates the key one in really great ways.

It's got a classier design and Scott Strait signs and the keys have moved from the left side, and now all three are on the right. What is brand-new are the dual cameras on the back. This is a first for any blackberry phone and the keyboard gets a new button as well. That's the speed key, and so this is something that will help you open up. Your keyboard shortcuts like when you need to long press to launch an app you're going to press that first and all the internals are upgraded as well.

So I do think that the company deserves kudos for bringing it into the modern age. I think that the key to is keyboard is definitely an improvement over the key one. The keys are bigger, 20%, taller, and they're, also more separated, but I still find the keyboard pretty cramped, and a lot of that just has to do with the shape of the phone. Nobody wants a wide phone that will give you a really spacious keyboard, so this is kind of what you're stuck with also I really hated having to use the alt and the shift keys to get to capitalization numbers and punctuation. It didn't make a lot of sense for me to kind of go all the way over to one side of the phone every time I wanted to do that.

It was a real pain. The fingerprint reader inside the space bar I really like the placement of it, but it wasn't always accurate for me. So I found myself having to try multiple times, often enough to unlock the phone other times. It worked just fine and then there's this capacitive home button on top of the keyboard, and probably at least half the time that I try to go home. I wind up touching the screen right above it opening up some like old text message or some app I, don't want to be in yeah.

I was pretty happy with photo quality. Actually, you've got the dual 12 megapixel cameras on the back 8 megapixel camera on the front of photos. When you had plenty of light, we're actually very good, very colorful, crisp and detailed, it's when you've got into low-light scenarios that the camera really struggled portrait mode photos were pretty usable as well you're, not going to see all the effects and controls that you might on other phones, you're, not gonna, have extra lighting options or control the blur effect. But again I was pretty happy with them. Selfies were alright, there's no Beauty mode.

Some people really like that. I could really take it or leave it myself. I would use a selfie, but definitely not the quality that you're going to see on some top tier phones yeah. You know this isn't a cheap device, and it's not for people who are focused on gaming or multimedia. This is for people who want to type a lot and type accurately.

These are for people who are interested in productivity. I think that it's a really great upgrade for people who have been using an older BlackBerry device, but if you're switching from an all screen phone, it's going to be frustrating and unfamiliar, especially at first.

Source : CNET