BlackBerry KEY2 Review - The Best BlackBerry Ever? By TechOdyssey

A lot of things have changed over the last year since the BlackBerry KET was released, but one thing hasn't changed and that's how well it performs so even after a year, I feel like the bike very key to hold up really well and not just because of the physical keyboard, but the snapdragon 616 and the six gigabytes of RAM is pretty future-proof and I think that this phone still has plenty left in the tank to get you even into 2020 and beyond. It still has a crisp modified, 1080p resolution screen. It's got plenty of power and the battery life lasts for days. So I think there's a lot here to look at. Even if you're, not a keyboard. Enthusiast, hey everybody, welcome back to tech Odyssey.

So today, I'm here with a review of the BlackBerry key ? in 2019, so I reached out to blackberry Mobile, and they were kind enough to send me a review unit. So I could do a follow-up review one year later, so I initially bought this phone whenever it came out. But, as you know, I go through so many phones, because I reviewed. So many devices I couldn't hang on to it as much as I loved it. So I wanted to take a look at it a year later and see how it still holds up, and I'm happy to say that it holds up really, really well.

The snapdragon 616, the six gigabytes I ran, is 64 gigabytes of storage, they're, pretty future-proof, so BlackBerry Mobile kind of had a pretty good idea of what they were doing whenever they made this device. So you could still use it beyond the year 2018, and here we are in 2019 a year later, still cooking with gas. So first things first, if you're interested in this phone at all is probably for this world-class industry-leading standard of a keyboard. So the keyboard is not only there for you to press buttons on, but it's touch sensitive, so you can swipe left to right. You can access your menus.

You can scroll up and down. It is an extension of the screen and the phone. So, instead of having to touch your screen all the time, you can get great one-handed use out of this simply by scrolling with your finger, and it works great for text prediction and things like that. So if you're typing, you can just give a little Swift swipe up with your finger, I'll actually show you here real quick. So here you go.

Here are some words, suggestions and, let's say help you can swipe up in the middle there, and it will go ahead and throw that word up there for you. So you get word suggestion for the predictive text. You can swipe slide up with your finger and then, if you want to erase it all, you have to do make sure the right way. Yep know what the right way you can swipe backwards, and you can delete stuff off the screen. So you don't have to worry about hitting the pesky back button all the time, so the keyboard holds up really well.

I think it was plagued initially with some quality control issues in the build quality. The original key to the space bar has a very distinct click sound that was different from the rest of the buttons it's still slightly different, but it does take up more space. Yeah, I'll go ahead and show you here, you can press the keyboard, so this will pick up, so you might can. These are the regular buttons, and this is just bass bar. So you still have that distinct, more of a flattery kind of click noise, but it's really not too noticeably different and there's actually something you kind of get used to it's an endearing, trait or quality, because, just like hitting your regular space bar on your keyboard, it has a distinctive clack, sound whatever you get ready to go ahead and go to the next word or the inter button.

So I think that it has held up well, and I think that over time some later production model units actually are better off than the original one. But overall the keyboard is phenomenal. Once you get used to typing on this thing, it really makes it frustrating to go back and type on a soft keyboard on a display like the iPhone or a regular Android device, because you're so used to being able to touch and feel- and you have that nice tactile field, feel and feedback, the sensation of pressing the keys and also being able to use the speed key. So you can access your different pre-selected apps, while you're using other apps, so you can multitask like a champ and then the regular hotkeys for the short press and the long press. So there's so much you can do, and then you have the trusty convenience key over here on the side which I have set to Google, so you can press it and the Google Assistant will come right up.

So you can pre-program that to anything you want as well. So that's one thing that I think is really important to hammer out when you talk about the key to, and that is the multitasking capability. It's not just for playing games. It's not just for typing. Furthermore, it's not just for sending out messages, emails and things like that.

You can do so much stuff with it, and you can do so much at the same time, because you have the ability to swap back and forth between apps seamlessly, just by using the speed key, the convenience key or your hotkeys from the home screen. So there's a lot going on there, it's very complex, but it's something that I think really makes an important device for people who care about it. And if you don't care about it, you at least probably appreciate it respect what it's able to do, even today in 2019 and one other cool feature that I think a lot of people don't know about is that the space bar actually doubles as a fingerprint sensor. So I have to do register your fingerprint and then press on the space bar and that's how you unlock your phone. But in addition to that, you can also take pictures two different ways.

You could take a regular picture, and it'll store it in your normal photo library. But if you just press your finger on there, as if you were registering your fingerprint, then it'll send it to your secure folder, and you have to be able to use your fingerprint to unlock it. So you can see that, so that's a cool little security feature that you have in there that you can work in with your photos, so pretty cool. So the next thing I want to look at is gaming. Yes, I said it gaming.

You can play video games on a blackberry. Oh my gosh as crazy things are happening. That's anarchy everywhere. Yes, you can play video games on your blackberry, so I test it out also obviously I test it out. Where is it World of Tanks, and then I also test it out? Batman the telltale games Batman, which is a really cool game, I hate what happened with telltale games their studio, but still a fantastic game.

If you want to check it out on the blackberry, it's a good one to play. So here's some footage from all three of those games. So you can see what the BlackBerry is capable of doing with the snapdragon 616 processors, at 6, gigabytes of RAM, alright, so here's some gameplay foot, Altos Odyssey- you can see that it runs nice and smooth, and I haven't run into anything yet, so I'm so live able to do nice backflips. So it's a fun little game, that's fun to pastime, and it's not too intensive, so you can play it without putting a strain on the phone. Now here is the Batman game and here's a little action scene from the beginning of the game.

Whenever I was playing through it and I wanted to show off one how well it runs at two I mean it's just fun. So if you want to download it and play the first episode, it's free, but you get to do some really, really cool Batman, stuff and fight crime and beat up some bad guys. So, if you're interested in that, it's just another great opportunity, you can play some games on the key -. Now here we go with World of Tanks, and I was having some fun shooting these guys. Now you can see that it runs nice and smooth.

You would think that it would be too much for this phone to handle, but really it plugs on quite nicely. This is live footage as I'm playing online in a live match. So I was able to play this without a problem and I cut to here. So you can watch me blow this tank up. So I have a nice successful gaming match, so it went really well, and it's a lot of fun to play games on here, so pretty cool, alright.

So next up on the agenda is the camera. So the camera has gone through a lot of software improvements, since the original key 2 came out, and I'm happy to say that it's much, much better, it's far improved, so I've got some photo samples in here for you to take a look at, but here's a little look at the interface of course, you've got HDR. You can turn that on or off, you've got the capability to have it on auto, and then you can go through some settings there. You can have it where you can use your volume buttons to take pictures, all that fancy jazz and then, of course, like I, said the fingerprint sensor or the space bar. Furthermore, you can use that to send the photos to your secure, folder or just to snap a regular photo, so it hits a lot of functionality that even incorporates the keyboard for the camera, but here's some of the photos that I took while I was out the other day doing a photo shoot alright.

So here you can see where I started my day at pleasure, pier in Galveston. It was nice bright sunshiny day, and then it turned to this, and we got some nice rain clouds that came through and forced us to lead, but I was able to get some nice pictures while was out there. Unfortunately, it wasn't too sunny when I was out there, but you can see a part of my finger there in the picture, but other than that you can see that it takes pretty good pictures too selfies, nice and natural. It's real, sharp, looking's I was really impressed with that, and then here is a great picture. Why still had some sunshine, the carousel looks fantastic nice pose there with a little captain figurine by the ship and then there's the Ferris wheel, which looks perfect with the sky.

In the background, and then here at the football game, the other night I was able to take a selfie and a picture of the field, so the camera, as you can see, takes pretty darn good pictures, alright and last but not least, I do want to talk about the performance, because yeah you've got the day-to-day performance. You can swipe left and right. You've got your menus. Furthermore, you're running a software update. So taking a look at the software update.

The last security patch is for August 5th. This is August 31st right now, so I wouldn't expect that the September patch would be out, but I anticipate. It will be there very soon and that's one of the wonderful things you get with blackberry is they're still giving you your monthly security updates even a year later, so they haven't fallen behind on that. So that's super nice and the operating system is still running just as it was a year ago, whenever I first tested it out. So I'm super happy to report that all right, so that's about all I got for the BlackBerry key -.

We talked about the camera. We talked about performance. Furthermore, we talked about gaming. Furthermore, we talked about the phenomenal keyboard. Now it's still an Android 8.1 I'm, hoping that they'll find a way to migrate that over to Android 9.0 as soon as possible, but they've been making incremental upgrades the software experience even updating the BlackBerry hub, that's on there. So there's a lot of cool things going on, and I think that it still holds up really well, even today in 2019 and of course, it's the best phone on the market that you can get with a keyboard.

So taking those things into consideration, I think that it's a really solid product, it's just a little on the pricey side and absolutely getting more difficult to find since it's been out over a year now. But overall, if you want a keyboard, if you want a phone that has a keyboard like this, and you want to get back into a BlackBerry I, don't think you're going to be disappointed and really this is for people who are interested in having a physical keyboard and people who are interested in the key, ? and blackberry. Specifically. So if you love before you've been on the fence, and you wanted to see how it held up, it's still a good phone and I still give it two thumbs up. So that's all I've got on my one-year review for the black grade.

Key ?, thanks for tuning in if you liked the video hit the like and subscribe button hit little notification bell, so you get the latest and greatest thanks for tuning in and as always I'll see you guys next time.

Source : TechOdyssey