BlackBerry KEYone Review: Go for it, BEST YET! By Erica Griffin

Hey everybody: this is Eric of a technology nerd likes to film stuff, and it is time for the full review of the BlackBerry key. One I have used this device for several weeks now. So here are my thoughts. First, let's introduce you to this unique looking phone and take a look around it on the front. We have an 8, megapixel camera, the receiver, LED notification, light and ambient light sensor, / proximity sensor. Then we have three capacitive navigation buttons and the glorious keyboard and I will talk a lot about this and its features.

We've also got a fingerprint reader, cleverly built into the space bar, and it works extremely well and is very fast. We've got a 4.5 inch, IPS display at approximately 433 pixels per inch it's equivalent to 1080p, but with a shorter aspect ratio, and it's protected by a Gorilla, Glass 4, then, on the back, we have a soft touch material which helps the grip of the device and I think it looks very professional. This thing is built like a tank and is very sturdy. We've also got a twelve point: three megapixel camera with an F 2.0 aperture, but no optical image. Stabilization thought it does have large 1.5, 5, micron pixels, and we have a dual tone: LED flash. Also, on the back.

We have NFC but no wireless charging. Then on the bottom we have a USB-C charging port, which includes quick charge 3.0 and can charge 50% in just 36 minutes. The grille on the right is a single speaker and the grille on the left is a microphone. This is a mono speaker device, not stereo, then, on the left hand, side is the power button and, on the right hand, side we have a SIM card, tray, /, SD card slot, the volume rocker and the very convenient convenience key. Lastly, at the top we have a microphone and a standard headphone jack now back into the studio.

Let's take a close look at that keyboard and all of its awesome features. This keyboard is really what makes this device what it is now this is an Android device, but getting it out of the way this isn't the best SPENT Android device. This is a phone. That's meant to be an ultimate productivity tool with Android capabilities, not meant to be an Android flagship, so don't treat it as one still. This is a very capable device, and it's really meant for people who are on the business side or even for those of you who are just not impressed by all the glass slabs that have been released as of late.

This really is something different and looks quite different too. So moving on with talking about this keyboard, the feeling of this keyboard is excellent. I've messed around with a lot of BlackBerry's in the past and I say that this one is definitely one of my favorite. It's got good tactile feedback, it's not mushy and feeling in any way. It's very responsive.

I can definitely tell the difference between keys, so I've had an easy time. Finding my way around this keyboard and overtime muscle memory has set in, and I can just type on this thing now, a second nature. The side Keys feel nice and responsive as well. It's just a good job, so you can see as I'm pressing all these keys, that the display doesn't turn on. So you're not going to have any issues with but dialing in your pocket, pressing on the space bar isn't going to make it come on, though it does have that fingerprint sensor, and it's very sensitive.

You just barely have to touch it with your thumb or whatever finger that has been programmed to it, and it unlocks it. For some reason, I kept thinking that pressing on the space bar was going to act as a whole button, but it's only going to be these capacitive keys here at the top. I eventually got trained away from that. This is just simply a space bar, so this isn't just any ordinary keyboard that just lets you type on it. It's also capacitive, so you can see that you can swipe left and right.

You can also swipe up and down, and once you really get the hang of it, it works pretty darn effectively, it's also pretty responsive as well. So this works really nice when you're scrolling up and down webpages, it's kind of like having a mouse or a trackball. Those of you who miss the trackball that BlackBerry's used to have, so it's kind of reminiscent of that also just as an aside for webpage scrolling. If you don't feel like flicking in using the capacitive capability, just hit the space bar, you can see it works just as well for page down my favorite feature of the keyboard. That really makes this device pleasurable to use.

Are the keyboard shortcuts? You can easily access this right here, and you have the option, long press and short press shortcuts. So, for example- and you need to be on the home screen to get this to work, and you also need to have the BlackBerry launcher so using a different launcher. This won't work, but you can see if I push T short press. It's going to bring up Twitter for me very, very simple, and if I long press if it's going to bring in two texts now, of course, you can easily put little icons on your home screen and access things, but I find this gets really useful when I want to contact. Somebody so just says: I need to contact my mom short press, M, really nice and simple, and it's the same thing.

I have program for my husband I, really, really like this. You can easily reprogram everything at will, and it makes accomplishing tasks really fast and efficient. Moving on to talking about some other functionality of this keyboard, I know a lot of you guys really can't stand having to touch these little tiny spots and try to get your cursor to be where it needs to be. But what's really cool is that you can double tap on the keyboard, and it brings up the ability for you to scroll over to the left right up down. So you can easily select that letter that you're trying to get to then you can also easily hit shift and select push upward to select further and bedaubing bada-boom there you go so to delete from here.

You just need to swipe from the right there you are so that's really handy. I didn't have to go and fool around with the screen at all. Another really nice feature. If you have a chance to dig into the settings, is that you can change one of these shift keys to the control key, and then you can do things like copy and paste cut, hit, shift, select all this now I. Can it my CTRL key copy, and then I can go control paste and that works really well too.

Now it does take some digging to find this. I can show you where it's located, so underneath languages and input you have keyboard settings blackberry keyboard advanced, so you see it's pretty far down in there, and you have some options for the control key. This took me forever to look through all this, so hopefully this helps, so I have physical keyboard control key right shift key really. They should have had this easier to access by default, because I don't need to shift keys. They also try to add little texting shortcuts in there, such as, if you double hits on the space bar as a period tennis space.

So it amazes me how efficiently they've tried to get this all right there, my name and as I'm typing you can see. It gives me some suggestions and I can just flick up at that word, and it completes it for me now. We are getting so used to these virtual keyboards on the screen, and it can be really fast with the predictive typing. So I'm really happy that we have this option for flicking like this. It makes the longer process of typing on a hardware keyboard a lot more smooth and with this ability, I feel like I'm, getting close to the on screen, typing speeds and when it comes to speed one of the first things that I notice is that I don't have quick access to emojis.

So, for example, it had to hit symbol, then I have to hit more, and then you can see, there are the emojis, and then you can press, but I don't have patience for that, and I don't have time for that. So the option to enable context. Emojis are really a nice thing. So if I say hello, you can see, puts a little hand there, and I can go ahead and select it. So this is a really quick, workaround, and I'll have to worry about going.

The long way hitting symbol now for those of you who have not mastered using the hardware keyboard or if you just for some reason, want to have access to the virtual keyboard. You can do that so go down from the top. You can see change keyboard now say, show virtual keyboard. So whenever the hardware keyboard shows, you will also see the virtual one and here's the blackberry one, which allows you to have the flick up feature and I do like using that. But for those of you who are fans of different types of keyboards to say Swift Key, you can definitely still have that too, but you can see I have to choke up the phone quite a bit to use it, and it's just kind of awkward kind of awkward, but it's an option.

This just takes up so much of the screen, though, that I won't ever use this I'm going to get a blackberry I'm going to use the keyboard, not an onscreen keyboard after using this extensively really, the only feature I think that they're missing is I, really wish that I could drag down. Words like this and pull down the notification shade. That would be very useful. Who knows maybe in a future update so like I mentioned earlier. If you do not have the BlackBerry default launcher, those keyboard shortcuts are not going to be accessible.

So, for example, if I hit T now for Twitter, it's just going to bring me up to a global search page, so I can just type in Twitter now, and you can see it right there. So this is still very useful. It's also going to look through all my phone looking for things that say Twitter in them, so that's not a bad trade off and if I need to access. My mom hit M on, and it's going to show my mom's contacts, so really there's no loss there. It's just not as fast and snappy and one button dish, but you can access the setting even underneath a BlackBerry launcher you just press and hold it brings you to settings, you can see typing action, so you can have used a short press, keyboard shortcut or start a search or just have it simply do nothing.

So that option is still there and still BlackBerry's own launcher is quite nice and clean, and I like it and I, don't really find a need to use a different launcher. I think they've done an excellent job and one thing that I really like are their flick widgets, so you can flick upward to access a widget on the home screen, and it becomes really handy when you flick up your messages so under here you can see previews ? all of your messages without having to go into the messaging application, so that is a nice little. Gem I also find that their launcher is pretty customizable. So, for example, if you really don't like this light, color that they have here just select these settings change it to the dark theme. How can you argue with that? You can also choose eye contacts, so that's really cool I just pick something random, moonrise, contact I can go ahead and select it set it, and you can see that everything here is now a custom icon and also, thankfully, their own launcher.

It's pretty responsive and snappy little of hiccups I see here in there, but nothing to write home about so moving back to some conclusions about this keyboard. Here are my thoughts. My sense about the keyboard is that it is very well-thought-out and effective for typing. Predictive text is pretty accurate, and it makes a process that already takes longer, because it is no longer virtual, be more quick. I would say that the one overall thing that gets pretty annoying with this keyboard is where this capacitive row of keys is so if I'm swiping, upward, add predicted word sometimes I accidentally hit on the circle button or on the recent key, or even on the back button and I exit out of my Apple together.

That gets pretty annoying. Thankfully it doesn't happen that often, but it is something to note I wish that these were virtual and not capacitive really wish this. It would make a lot of sense for them to disappear while you're typing and to easily just swipe it up as UI element. Now, as for some other BlackBerry features, it is probably the most secure Android device around. That alone should sway some people.

It gets constant security updates and has the D tech security monitoring app. We've got a bevy of BlackBerry apps, including the BlackBerry hub, unified inbox blackberry, password keeper to keep many passwords filed in safe productivity edge to take a peek at your most important info and many others as they fully convert an Android person. It's hard to switch from my workflow of reliable apps on to BlackBerry's software, but I don't have to switch, is an Android device now taking a peek at 7.1.1 Android, we still have access to the Google Assistant, though I prefer to use the convenience key to access Google now and the skin looks like basic Android. We can still tap. The reason is key to switch between two most recent apps.

We can hold down on the recent key to access a multi window view, though in sliding the window at all. It's going to exit an application and I find the 4:3 aspect to be just too short to enjoy this multi window feature. As for something I'm missing, it would really be nice if we had access to a blue light filter moving on to talking about the actual device itself. Without the keyboard in mind, it is a decent performer, smooth and responsive enough, though not always it has the Snapdragon 625 SOC inside it. Three gigabytes of RAM and I was happy to see that the device is pretty decent with multitasking, with three gigabytes of RAM.

I can get at least ten apps open and cycle between them. Granted before the update pushed to the reviewer units, I saw many people complaining that the device just performed, horribly, and I think it's just going to get better with updates it's not the fastest at loading large applications and can sometimes be sluggish intermittently. So we shall see how the updates go. If we run to benchmarks, it can't touch the likes of the new Snapdragon 820 5 SOC, but that's okay. Everyday performance is more than strong enough games play ok on this device, but some are not as smooth as more powerful devices or reaching the same peak frame rates.

Still I can't imagine the target audience carrying much about gaming on this device. If you are so inclined to play games like racing type game, the keyboard being in the way lends to some awkward gameplay I prefer portrait mode games on this device unless you're able to map the keyboard into being a makeshift controller. Also, the keyboard being in the way makes for some awkward media consumption, because the device will always have issues with letter boxing still casually watching YouTube. Video or two is just fine. The calibration of the display is not the best out there and, if I'm a displayed to have a much too cool of a white point, even when adjusting for the white point under settings, it just doesn't help much.

The device is capable of producing a wide range of colors, but what is being done with the colors makes no sense. The saturations are kind of all over the place, and this doesn't lend well to color accuracy. Still, it's got a decent contrast ratio and gets nice and bright for outdoors. There is an RGB mode under developer options, but it is not working yet, so I'm, not sure if they will get this working upon release. So this is not a media and gaming device.

It is capable of those things, but if those things are your main focus, this is not the device for you. As for battery life, it's got a three thousand five hundred and five William hour battery and with a good choice of processor. This thing lasts more than a day. I can easily get six hours of onscreen time out of it, and I can carry it around and feel pretty confident that well into the next day, I'm going to have some powers still and when it does need to be charged pretty quickly, with quick charge, 3.0 up to 50% at just 36 minutes. The single speaker on this thing gets loud enough, and yes, it's just one speaker, not stereo speakers, but I do wish that it would get a bit louder.

Phone calls come through. Clearly enough, though I saw myself wishing that the receiver could get a bit louder for those noisy environments. The last thing that I want to talk about in this review is the camera. Now I want to keep this short and sweet. I have never used a blackberry for the camera quality and up until now, things have been pretty lacking, so I'm glad that this is a camera.

I can get step using during the day, and it's still going to take pretty nice shots, so I don't have to feel screwed even in low-light. Shots are not too bad, although pretty noisy I was not pleased, though, that it kept telling me images were a focus when they weren't, and there is no optical image stabilization, both which sometimes led to some blurry shots, but mostly I had no issues. It's an F, 2.0 aperture, twelve point three megapixel camera and has the same sensor as the Google Pixel and like the Google Pixel. It also lacks optical image stabilization, but the pixel allowed excellent software stabilization that even worked for 4k videos. Furthermore, it looks like we don't have any stabilization on 4k videos at all here, which is a bummer for me.

Furthermore, it's not the best vlogging camera software. Video stabilization doesn't work for 60 frames-per-second videos, either even 720p 60 frames per second, their camera app is kind of clunky and doesn't get many points from me. I find it especially awkward to have to go into settings to access the manual mode, I wouldn't even know it was there I'm, also not too happy that we don't have the choice for image resolution only aspect in whether it's a high quality JPEG or a compressed one. There is also no choice for shooting and raw which I'm relying on more and more these days to get the best look out of my important images possible. It is pretty darn cool, though, that we can use the capacitive keyboard to control the various Flyers.

This also works in the manual mode as well. So, overall, this is a pretty solid phone. It's got solid performance for the most part and is extremely secure for business class. It is a no-nonsense device meant for productivity, but can also handle the fun stuff well enough, as well. I think if you really need a physical keyboard, want the best security possible or just want something different.

This may be for you, so let me know what you guys think about the key one. Is it your dream phone? Is this? What you wish blackberry would have put out many years ago. I think that the BlackBerry image is safe in TCL's, hands and I hope to see more BlackBerry devices like this one in the future. Granted it is not as powerful as the Drive and doesn't have as nice of a display. It was AMOLED, but the keyboard is better.

The battery life is certainly better, and the performance is more balanced without issues of overheating. So that's a win, so this is been Erica. The technology nerd likes to film stuff, please rate comment and subscribe. I hope you guys enjoyed the video, have a good night bye.

Source : Erica Griffin