Before TCL took over BlackBerry smartphone production and marketing, the BlackBerry Priv was released running Android Lollipop and will stay on Marshmallow.
Future BlackBerry-branded smartphones sold in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh will be manufactured and distributed by a company called Optiemus.
But we now know for certain the “BlackBerry brand legacy will live on in a new generation” of TCL-made smartphones. Yes, that’s smartphones (plural), and an entire new “generation”, although we’re merely promised a “first look” at the “evolutionary” addition of the new BlackBerry brand of smartphones to the company’s “current portfolio.”
If we were to venture a wild guess therefore, we’d expect the physical QWERTY keyboard-sporting DTEK70, aka Mercury, to get a full announcement between January 5 and 8, with general (and generic) plans of what comes next also likely to be further discussed.
TCL Communication Technology Holdings Limited (TCT) aims to transition from the “number four handset manufacturer in North America to a tier one portfolio brand” with this “business update”, trusting BlackBerries to work as “building blocks of our new growth strategy.” And yes, “additional announcements” are on schedule for later in 2017, so we’re definitely looking at a partnership for the long haul.
The Priv, DTEK50 and DTEK60 will head into 2017 with a new look in some of their apps. BlackBerry has announced updates to its Hub+ apps, Android keyboard, Launcher and Password Keeper that include bugfixes and performance tweaks.
Beyond that, Hub+ apps now keep your cadre of accounts more organized by allowing users to hide some of them and prevent them from syncing data. A default email account can also be set for use from within the Hub. Emails can be prioritized by contacts and shown with the contacts’ avatars besides the message previews. Attachments in the .eml format are now viewable. The Tasks app can now hide completed tasks.
The Android Launcher gets “a sleeker, sexier look” with a dark theme while the keyboard has some new tricks in its same sleeve, including a more responsive switchover to different languages, Stoke and Zhuyin Chinese input and fingerprint support for Password Keeper access (as on the DTEK60). Speaking of the Keeper, there’s now a built-in webview browser, a revised and clarified password font and non-Latin character support.
If you already have these apps and haven’t taken the time to check out updates, you will probably want to do so ASAP.
It’s not over until… CEO John Chen explicitly says it is. BlackBerry may have issued an official press release a little while back corroborating rampant rumors of the financially struggling Canadian company’s “plans to end all internal hardware development”, but apparently, a very important part of the story was left out.
Namely, Chen’s “promise” to build at least one more “keyboard phone” in-house, which the outspoken executive still intends to uphold. He won’t say exactly when, just that it’s not going to be “that long”, and everything from the market moniker of the device “coming” soon to its design, hardware specifications and software type also stays under wraps.
Mind you, BlackBerry could go one of a few different paths in integrating a physical QWERTY keypad, perhaps following in Priv’s, Passport’s or even Classic’s footsteps. And although Android feels like the most logical platform choice going forward, the security specialist’s proprietary BlackBerry 10 OS is technically not dead yet.
It remains to be seen if maybe the recently leaked DTEK70 design hasn’t been outsourced to TCL after all, and we’re also interested to hear more about the two companies, one from China and the other from India, currently running neck and neck in a race to launch the next BlackBerry-licensed phone.
Oh, and if you’re curious what John Chen thinks of Donald Trump’s “shocking” US election win, there’s roughly 8 minutes of that too in the same Bloomberg interview.
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