TCL has announced via the BlackBerry Mobile twitter account that the BlackBerry ‘Mercury’ qwerty phone will be unveiled on February 25, right at the beginning of Mobile World Congress.
TCL previewed an early build of the smartphone earlier this month, and neither the official specs nor even the official name for the smartphone (dubbed ‘Mercury’) have been officially revealed.
The device has a full-featured hardware keyboard which is not only good for typing, but it also retains the capacitive swiping gestures seen in the Priv — you can swipe on the keyboard to navigate the interface, and swipe up on it during typing to help with word corrections and suggestions.
25.02.17 #MWC2017 #BlackBerryMobile pic.twitter.com/uChVjp62TJ
— BlackBerry Mobile (@BBMobile) January 24, 2017
Above the keyboard, BlackBerry chose to move back to fixed capacitive navigation keys. The keyboard has the full set of functions available on the Priv, but also has the addition of a fingerprint sensor in the space bar.
As for the the rest of the phone hardware, you get a volume rocker and programmable key on the right edge, a power button the left edge, a headphone jack on the top and USB-C port on the bottom centered between two speaker grilles.
