First look at BlackBerry Key2 smartphone - All Hands on Tech By ITWC

On June 7 TCL announced the new BlackBerry key to smartphone. The Chinese manufacturer is following up on its debut of the flagship device, the BlackBerry key one released last spring. This brings us the latest version of that iconic blackberry keyboard. That was first invented in Waterloo. We really liked the key one. In fact, it made our top 5 list for best smartphone of 2017, so we're curious to see how TCL updates this device, which is a unique form factor on the smartphone market.

Today we got an early peek of the device, and we'll be taking a close look at it here. Welcome to all hands on tech, I'm your host Brian Jackson, compared to the key one. The keys offered on the key to are 20% bigger TCL, says that's to help make typing on this device even easier. The metal frets between each row of keys has also been removed. This helps you feel your way around the keyboard.

A bit better new to the BlackBerry. Key too is the speed, keep replacing the shift key on the right hand, side just hold this down and press any of the other keys to trigger pre-programmed shortcuts. You can do this even when you're inside another app the short cards are up to the user. You can have two shortcuts per key one for a short press and one for a long press. For example, you could make quickly pressing em, open up Google Maps or for when you press and hold em.

It could open up messenger. As with other recent BlackBerry devices, the key 2 comes with exclusive access to detect. This app gives you visibility into what permissions your apps are using on your phone. A new interface presents a much cleaner look for this out quickly, alerting you to any possible problems. Tech will now proactively flag the user when a sensitive permission is used.

Are you paranoid that Facebook is listening to you? D Tech will flag you every time. The app accesses the microphone BlackBerry's priority on security also continues with its commitment to patch Android as soon as Google pushes out updates the key to also ships with the Firefox focus browser installed, which is built with privacy in mind. The key to now comes with the dual lens camera on the rear, with a dual LED flash. Another new feature for the camera is that when you're taking a photo using the fingerprint sensor as the shutter button, the image will be saved to a special photo blocker. That means it saved only on the device and not backed up in any cloud that you might normally use.

The fingerprint sensor is still found on the space bar. By the way the display is unchanged since the key one. It's also the same 3,500 William battery here, but the key to will feature a new app called power center. Blackberry says it uses a high to warn users how much battery life they have left a feature called contextual battery will learn how you use your phone and how much power you'll need as a result. What's different, here is a minimum of 64 gigabytes of storage space and there's also a new fast processor with a snapdragon 660.

This processor was designed by Qualcomm to bring flagship performance to me into your devices. Hopefully that will give the key to a nice speed upgrade. It might also help explain why the price is a bit higher than the key one at launch. The BlackBerry q2 will be available both in black and silver upon release. It is priced starting at 829 dollars in Canada and is expected to be available fairly soon.

Thanks for watching all hands on tech for IT world Canada, I'm, Brian, Jackson.

Source : ITWC