TCL, the makers of Alcatel and newer Blackberry phones, put up the upcoming Blackberry-branded smartphone simply known as Mercury, on display at the CES 2017. This device has surfaced in a number of leaks and TCL North America president Steve Cistulli has confirmed the existence of this device.
While the final launch name is still a mystery, attendants at the CES 2017 got a first hand experience of the pre-production model. Judging by this Blackberry Mercury hands on video released by PC Mag, the smartphone runs Android Nougat OS with Blackberry software on top and has a physical keyboard.
The Mercury has a microSD slot, Single SIM slot, USB Type-C port, big camera lens (rear), 32GB built-in storage space out of which about 24GB is available to the user, 3GB of RAM and the LCD display has the perfect, although unusual 1620 x 1080 pixels screen ratio for an Android phone.
The QWERTY keyboard is capacitive like the ones found on the Blackberry Passport and the fingerprint sensor is embedded into the space bar. Previous leaks suggests the device will have a huge 3400mAh battery, 18MP main camera and Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC, however, TCL wouldn’t confirm this.
