BlackBerry delays KEYone release until May

BlackBerry has reportedly delayed the launch of the KEYone smartphone, unveiled at the Mobile World Conference (MWC) in Barcelona in late February, until May.

During the launch, the company announced to release the phone sometime around in April.

“We just launched two phones, or we helped our partners launch two phones. One in Indonesia and that one is shipping already. The second one, that TCL announced at Mobile World Congress which is the physical keyboard on an Android, that one is not going to be slated to ship until probably the May timeframe. I think the first manufacturing production run is at the end of April. So the product looks pretty good, but the worldwide availability is going to be later than May,” said BlackBerry's CEO John Chen during the company’s earning calls.

KEYOne is that BlackBerry smartphone that the firm hyped to launch with its traditional physical QWERTY keypad for the one last time.

The smartphone sports a 4.5-inch full-HD IPS display with a pixel density of 433ppi and Corning Gorilla Glass 4, is powered by the Snapdragon 625 Octa-Core SoC, alongside 3GB of RAM and Adreno 506 GPU, a 12MP camera and an 8MP front sensor. Internal storage is capped at 32GB with expandable storage of up to 2TB. It runs on a 3505mAh battery and has support for Quick Charge 3.0 which provides 50 per cent charge in approx. 36 minutes. It runs on Android 7.1 Nougat and will now be available in May, at a price of $549 (approx. 38,600).