There were a lot of rumours of BlackBerry launching an all-touchscreen Android smartphone named “Krypton.” In early October, there were leaked images of a BlackBerry smartphone with no physical keyboard named ‘Motion’. Now, BlackBerry has made it official by announcing the new BlackBerry Motion at an electronics trade show in Dubai.
Alain Lejeune, Global General Manager for BlackBerry Mobile, had this to say about the new BlackBerry Motion:
While the initial launch of our newest BlackBerry smartphone will be limited, this is an exciting addition to our growing BlackBerry smartphone portfolio, setting a strong foundation for further portfolio and market growth in the years to come.
The BlackBerry Motion has a 5.5 inch 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD display with DragonTrail glass on top for protection. Powering the device is a massive 4000 mAh battery and it runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box. Under the hood, the device has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset, 2.0GHz octacore processor, 4GB RAM and 32GB onboard storage, which is expandable up to 2TB via microSD card. The convenience key found on the KEYone retains its place on the Motion as well. The convenience key is a physical button that can be remapped to launch any action or application. The fingerprint sensor is housed inside the home button which is designed like the BlackBerry logo. Two touch capacitive button for navigation sit on the either side of the home button.
On the optics front, the BlackBerry Motion has a 12MP rear-facing camera with an f/2.0 aperture and 1.55-micron pixel size. The rear camera is capable of recording 4K videos at 30fps. On the front is an 8MP camera with an f/2.2 aperture and an LED flash.
TCL and BlackBerry are releasing the Motion in a handful of markets at first, with other markets following in Q4 of 2017. It’ll retail in the UAE for Dh1699 and in Saudi Arabia for 1699 Riyal. That translates to around US$460 or Rs 30,000.
