BlackBerry announced the new phone during MWC 2017

Apr 1, 2017 10:27 GMT  ·  By

BlackBerry unveiled the new KEYone with a physical keyboard back in February, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and, at the time, the company revealed that the phone would arrive sometime in April.

It seems that BlackBerry decided to delay the worldwide release of its newest smartphone and announced that the KEYone would hit markets one month later, in May.

“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.

It seems that the delayed release date applies to all countries where the KEYone was available for pre-order for a price of about $550.

A BlackBerry tablet could be in the works

Still, BlackBerry does have some good news for fans. Apparently, one of the company’s partners is looking to build a tablet running on Android and wants BlackBerry to provide them the portfolio rights to do so. The matter isn’t set in stone, but the CEO said that the tablet would run BlackBerry software and thus the company would receive royalties based on sales.

It remains to be seen if the tablet will actually reach development stages, but in the meanwhile we’re anxiously waiting for the KEYone to hit shelves. The smartphone runs an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, and a 3,505mAh battery with Quick Charge 3. The 12MP Sony IMX378 sensor on the back has 4K recording capabilities and f/2.0 aperture.