BlackBerry has previously confirmed that it will no longer manufacture smartphones. Shortly after this announcement, the company later tied-up with TCL Communication (TCT) to manufacture and sell BlackBerry-branded smartphones. One week subsequent to the BlackBerry-TCL partnership news, TCL has now confirmed that it will launch the new BlackBerry mobile phones at the upcoming CES 2017.
TCL has mentioned in a press release that it will reveal more news about their plans regarding the BlackBerry smartphone brand at CES and will also provide a glimpse into what the new BlackBerry mobiles will propose from TCT. TCL has semi-exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute the BlackBerry-branded smartphones globally excluding major markets like India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. TCL has already manufactured BlackBerry’s latest mobiles, the DTEK 50 and the DTEK 60.
The BlackBerry-TCL partnership is very similar to the Nokia-HMD Global partnership. The Nokia-brand has already promised to make a comeback in 2017 and a few Nokia mobiles have been buzzing online from past few months. Similar to Nokia, BlackBerry too had dominated the mobile phone market handful years ago because of its unique offerings such as popular BlackBerry Messenger and physical QWERTY keyboard.
Both Nokia and BlackBerry failed to compete with the development of the other mobile vendors such as Samsung and several other Android mobiles manufacturers which offered better products at affordable prices. BlackBerry had launched a few full-fledged Android smartphones like BlackBerry Priv in the market, but the smartphone was goofed up with its pricing. Later, the company unveiled DTEK 50 and DTEK 60 smartphones with competitive price tags which also failed to grab a fair market share.
TCL has not revealed the look of its new BlackBerry-branded smartphone, but a new BlackBerry smartphone has made headlines in recent weeks, named as BlackBerry Mercury. The Mercury is also believed to be the final device from BlackBerry.
John Chen who is CEO at BlackBerry has confirmed that the company is undeniably working on its last in-house smartphone that will come with iconic QWERTY keyboard. If the rumors are to be believed, the smartphone will come with a 4.5-inch display and will be equipped with Snapdragon 625 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.
