More smartphones will be launched through partnerships

Jan 6, 2017 05:17 GMT  ·  By

Although TCL has already teased the Mercury, an upcoming BlackBerry smartphone, the device has yet to be officially introduced. We know quite a lot of things about the handset, including the fact that this could be the last smartphone made by BlackBerry.

This information has been confirmed, once again, by BlackBerry's CEO John Chen. During a press event at CES, Chen has reiterated that the Mercury will be the last smartphone fully designed by BlackBerry's engineers, Mashable reports.

The last model we engineered and designed ourself, yes that will be the last one,” said Chen. He also stated that the Mercury would eventually make its way into shelves sometime in 2017, something that we've been expecting as well.

BlackBerry's exit from the smartphone market won't mean that we won't be seeing any devices released under the Canadian brand.

Chen explains that his company will now be able to focus its resources on other endeavors, while partners like TCL will build BlackBerry-branded smartphones.

BlackBerry Mercury
BlackBerry Mercury

What you're going to see over time is more phones. There's going to be more BlackBerry phones out there because now I have multiple parties creating and distributing and I have local party to compete in the local space - countries which I normally can't compete with,” explained Chen.

We have yet to see the first BlackBerry smartphones designed and engineered by other companies, but TCL already has some experience in the matter since the DTEK50 and DTEK60 have been built by the Chinese handset maker.

The BlackBerry Mercury is supposed to be a QWERTY smartphone with mid-range hardware. The phone is expected to sport a 4.5-inch display with 1620 x 1080 pixel resolution.

An octa-core Snapdragon 625 processor could be inside the Mercury, along with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory (expandable via microSD). We hope to find out more details about price and availability in the coming days.

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BlackBerry Mercury
BlackBerry Mercury
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