BlackBerry’s new keyboard phone is doomed to be a noble failure
After the BlackBerry’s Mobile World Congress event, saw the new BlackBerry KeyOne,
an Android phone with an obvious difference. The KeyOne is a return to
classic BlackBerry form, hitching a full physical keyboard to the bottom
of a solidly built, decently specced Android device with a layer of
BlackBerry security and apps spread atop Google’s Nougat. I like this
phone for daring to be meaningfully distinctive, but I fear its fate has
already been sealed by factors outside of its maker’s control.
TCL is the company that BlackBerry licensed its brand to
for this model, and the KeyOne is the first fruit of that partnership
that people can actually feel attracted to (as opposed to just being
okay with having their employer issue them one). But the big problem
here is the price of that attraction. In an unusual move for MWC, TCL
actually announced a price and release window for the BlackBerry KeyOne,
and while the April launch is reasonably imminent, the price of $549/
€599 is basically suicidal. It’s especially egregious in Europe, where
it essentially puts the device on the top pricing tier.
Trying to compete with the established premium phones on
the market is hard enough when you have the same specs as them. The
KeyOne doesn’t have a premium-tier processor (even though the Snapdragon
625 that it does have is no slouch),
it doesn’t have a premium-tier screen size with its 4.5-inch display,
and it doesn’t have a proven premium-tier camera. I’m fond of saying
that specs should take a backseat to real-world experience, but we all
know that’s not how people shop for devices. The BlackBerry KeyOne loses
any cross-comparison done in store, and moreover, it fails by not
having the distribution agreements with carriers that will get it in
stores in the first place.
So why do I call it noble?
Because this BlackBerry-branded phone is the first we’ve seen in a long
time that addresses the issue of messaging from a hardware perspective.
There’s precious little room to innovate messaging input when everyone’s
using the same touchscreen technology, which is why every other phone
manufacturer has fixed its attention on camera tech. LG and Huawei are
doing dual cameras, Sony has a triple imaging sensor, and everyone
is quadrupling down on selfies. This show promises to be a total Mobile
Camera Congress, if you’re concerned primarily with phone innovation.
Except this BlackBerry is about a different and, for some
people, better form of input. I’ve grown far too accustomed to a
touchscreen interface to say that typing with a physical keyboard is
preferable for me, but I can see the appeal. I can see how
muscle memory can kick in with real keys in a way that it never will
with a flat surface. And the swiping interactions across the keyboard
are actually really useful and neat. I used them to switch between home
screens and scroll through theverge.com
in Chrome and it was all very intuitive and natural. The BlackBerry UI
tweaks also include tying shortcuts to particular keys, so you can just
press "F" for Facebook, "Y" to launch YouTube, and so on.
A great deal of the appeal of the keyboard will be in how it allows you
to keep the screen uncluttered, showing more information. That’s what
makes it kind of okay to have a 4.5-inch display: you still see at least
as much on screen as the regular Android phone user with the software
keyboard up.
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