BlackBerry Key 2 Full Review! By Nick Ackerman

So this is the BlackBerry key to the successor to the BlackBerry key one with a bigger keyboard and a more intelligent keyboard. Is it enough for make you purchase a blackberry in 2018, let's find out in this full review coming up right now, let's go, so what is up guys Nick here, helping you to master your technology, beginning with the key specifications that matter here, a 4.5 inch, 16 20 by 1080p display? This is a 3 by 2 aspect ratio, its LCD IPS, a 12 megapixel, dual camera 4k 30fps, 2, X optical zoom, portrait mode, a snapdragon 616 with 6 gigs of ram a 3,500 William hour battery and a 20% larger keyboard. Now the first thing: you're gonna notice is 168 grams. It's a pretty light phone. It's not the lightest phone on the planet, but pretty light at 8.5 millimeters thick. Furthermore, it's not the thinnest phone I've ever seen, but you wouldn't want a super thin blackberry as it would be slipping out of your hands when you're trying to type, so I, don't have a problem with that.

Now taking off to the right side, you can see your volume rocker! You can see your power button that does have ridges built in and the all-new convenience key, which is nice here for the BlackBerry and at the bottom. There is nothing now on the front we do have that LCD. This is a 3 by 2 like I just mentioned, and you have that front-facing camera up at the top and that earpiece this is not OLED. So it's not going to be super saturated, but still pretty nice at the bottom. We have that 20% larger keyboard, as we already mentioned, and it's very well spaced out and very easy to type once you do get used to it or if you're, a BlackBerry veteran you're, not gonna, have too much of an issue.

You know typing on this at all, and the speed key is available with the fingerprint built-in to the keyboard. So, overall it's a very nice spacious keyboard and what you would expect out of a BlackBerry device in 2018. Now at the bottom. You can see that you do have yourself that mono speaker with the USB 3.0 port and over to the left and microphone for talking and people hearing you on the other end, and then you have some antenna bands at the bottom they're. Not that easy to see.

However, up at the top, you can see the micro SD card up to 128 gigs, plus a SIM card tray antenna band up there and at the bottom we see a little of a gap between the body and the keyboard. You have to fit it in somehow, but I can just see that, and I notice that little small detail you might want to get the black one of little. Details like that fit and finish bothers you now up at the top 8 megapixel camera on the front and an earpiece off to the right with precision cut holes in the middle. So you can hear people on the other end. Now, at the top we do have ourselves a 3.5, millimeter, headset, jack, very refreshing and a microphone hole. You could see a little of a hump on the camera lens now the rear shows a plastic back, which is very refreshing, considering pretty much all Android phones are going to glass backs for fragility reasons.

I like this and 7000 series aluminum along the edges. I noticed this phone is very square like a Sony phone or like a Samsung, Note 8 device very square like that blackberry logo, in the middle and up at the top left. You do have yourself that dual camera and a dual tone LED flash. So that's basically the body of the BlackBerry key to now. The feel in the hand of this device is another story.

It actually feels you know rather large, even though I have a 4.5 inch display, but the grip on the back makes it me feel like I, never was really going to drop. This phone and I actually didn't drop it once my whole week using it, no matter how clumsy I was pretty good grip on this device overall, but people with small hands are going to have quite a reach, because this phone is pretty tall. Even though it's only a 4.5 inch phone I still have to use two hands sometimes to use this device. Now you can see a large 6.3 inch, Android smartphone next to the BlackBerry key -. You can see it's almost as tall, so those of you who, like smaller phones, this is definitely not a smaller phone and that's the overall design and body of the BlackBerry key to you.

It's really going to come down to your personal preference, but I think it works out very well for what a blackberry is supposed to do now. Talking about the display we're talking about an IPS, LCD in-plane, switching display, this is capacitive, 16 million colors, and we do have 55.2 screen a body ratio, 434 pixels per inch, and you do have some display settings like the colors' mode, which allows you to change us from saturated boosted and natural, but being as though this is a liquid crystal display. I can't really see too much of a difference in those different modes, because OLED is the one that really benefits from that mode. But where you do benefit is the ability to change how you multitask in your recent stab two tiles Rolodex in masonry. You can see.

This is how it comes out of the box in masonry, and then you go to tiles, and you can little tile view. So this is cool as well for the busy person who wants to choose how to multitask. This is an awesome inclusion. Also, you can put it on Rolodex, which is basically what every other Android phone does and if you're not used to those other ones. You might want to go to that mode now in terms of brightness.

This phone definitely gets very bright, but definitely doesn't get as bright. As you know, the brightest phones on the market- it's still bright enough for what you need to use it for I, didn't have any trouble really seeing it outdoors here are your included wallpapers on the phone and I, don't think they're the best I've ever seen, but it's going to come down to personal preference with this again, you know, wallpapers are totally subjective, but it's nice that we have at least five to seven of them to choose from now. This phone is not great for watching videos. I didn't really enjoy this at all, but blackberry is not gonna, be marketing this towards the multimedia head. This is towards the business professional.

The person wants to communicate, use the BlackBerry hub, get things done on their phone, not sit around watching videos on it now I do like the fact that you can watch little videos and this little pop-up view. This is based on the Android software. It was really cool to multitask on this display and two different. You know windows on this tiny, with a keyboard phone. It's just a really cool experience with this.

Now for the keyboard, we're talking about a redesigned keyboard that has been 20 percent larger than the key one, that's actually in the height Department. Now this device also has a fingerprint embedded within the know: keyboard space bar, and you can have intelligent swipe actions as well, where you could swipe through pages. You could swipe through. You know web browsing, pretty cool and of course you have the legacy shortcut keys here as well, for the BlackBerry key too. But what's really neat here is that you can assign pretty much any key.

You want to anything so, for example, if I hit the C button, I want to go ahead and sign the calculator to the C button. We're going to go ahead and click calculator, and you can see now that shortcut is saved. So if I had C, we now go into calculator, but an all new feature here: well, not all new, but for the first time in 10 years, is the speed key next to the symbol key which allows you to go ahead and get into those shortcuts in any application making this a lot more useful than prior device blackberry key one where you had to go to the home screen to go into these so now, I could just hold that speak key wherever I'm at, and I'm going to the device at any time. I want. So that's pretty cool going into those different apps.

Now, in terms of the typing experience itself, it's going to come down to how good you are on a BlackBerry keyboard. Personally, I. Wasn't that great so far, because I have to get used to I, haven't typed in a BlackBerry in a while, but overall I think it's very satisfying to hear those clicks to feel the actual keyboard versus a touchscreen on his phone and I. Think over time. With this new flick typing, you can go ahead and get very accurate, very fast, honest device, but if that's not enough for you on the BlackBerry KET, they do have the ability to use the virtual keyboard, which is also the BlackBerry virtual keyboard.

So we can type with that keyboard as well, which also supports suggestive text and flick typing, as well, so pretty cool to have the touchscreen blackberry keyboard and the actual physical keyboard, and that's still not enough for you. You can go ahead and download the SEE board, which basically is the best keyboard, another Android devices you can go ahead and just use swipe on here and just swipe really fast. However, I think it's kind of you know awkward to use the touchscreen keyboard, honest device, because you have the physical keyboard and just it's just kind of weird to have them both on-screen and at the bottom. So I would suggest trying to get used to using the keyboard itself on the bottom. Now, in terms of software, it Android 8.1 point 0 Oreo. This is basically the latest version you can get on the Android device, and it does have BlackBerry's own launcher on it, so it does have still a very blackberry like experience.

They included all of these new little shortcuts right here compose an email, a text message view your alarms, check, battery levels. Data usage, add notes, tasks, keyboard shortcuts, so you have all those included apps there. You do have the productivity tab over here to the right, and you can go ahead and see you can see your calendar. You can see your hub, you can see your to-do lists, your contacts and even your own personalized witch trace. So this is pretty useful if you're into the whole, you know checking your daily feed over there off from the right now in the tray, it's kind of like a pixel launcher in the tray.

You can see widgets here and then over it all the way to the right. You have even more shortcuts. So there's plenty of shortcut action going on for this device. So if you're, the type of person who likes to get things done fast, and you need shortcuts to all of those actions that you are going to be performing, this is gonna, be one of the best phones on the market that you can buy and in the settings you have your typical blackberry services as in BBM, and then you have device transfer the BlackBerry camera, and over here you can see that we do have the device search and due. This is the security system by blackberry that showcases, how secure your device is at all times, which is a pretty cool feature to have for this phone as it is.

It should be very secure. It's gonna, be your ultimate communications device in the BlackBerry hub. You can text message, you can use your emails, multiple ones, you can use social media, then you have the locker. Now in the locker you can, you know, use the Firefox focus browser which is like private browsing, and you can lock up some files in the notable application. You can write things like BBM, for example, or draw notes.

Things like that. You can take pictures and draw over pictures in this application. They got multiple colors, so there is no pen on this device, but you can use your finger to do quite a bit of drawing right there now a little below that we have the BlackBerry password keeper, which is nice, because you don't have to get one of those subscription for the multiple password keeper applications on the market. We have the power center, which can check on your battery life and the privacy shade, which is a feature I really like, as you can kind of just cut off most of the screen and just zoom in on the spots you like and want to see yourself I've been using this quite a bit when it comes to banking out in public, like I've opened up my banking app I, don't want people to see it on the train or whatever I'm out I. Just don't want to see that you can go ahead and do that in the privacy shade.

Also, you can make this a little lighter if you want, if it's too dark, you can change the shapes of this as well, and you can access this privacy shade from the notifications' tray as well. Three fingers swipe will also get you into this privacy shade. So this is a pretty cool feature for people. Don't want people peeping over their shoulders when they're out and about looking at their device. You also have the radio built in and the redactor, which allows you to go ahead and basically draw a black spot over your entire screen.

So, if somebody's trying to peep what you're doing you could also block that out as well. So these are the type of security things you never see on other Android phones granted. These are kind of on the surface. They're not like you know, security features as in like encryption stuff like that, but they're. Just things that you know, I was gonna.

Allow people to not see what you're doing so. That's a pretty cool feature now in the software itself in the settings there's not much in the way of extra features, besides stock Android, except for the convenience key setting, which you can go ahead and change to anything you want which I like you don't see this on our phones, you can make it to camera. If you want, you can make a Google search which I did, and you can make it anything you would like, which is really cool, because you know you can go ahead and set up an application that really is used more often, you don't want to be hunting around for it. That's where that comes in handy. You also could turn off that three finger.

Privacy, tray and you have double tap to get into this software as well face on lock, is also on board via the Google smart, lock settings for this phone. So overall it's a pretty complete software package with excellent security features on board. So the performance we have a snapdragon 616 point two one gigahertz CPU. So what this CPU is really close to. You are a snapdragon 835, although it's not quite up to that level, it does have six gigs of ram and what that Ram and being almost as good as 835.

You really can't tell the difference between this and a flagship phone. It's going to get the job done for most folks on the day-to-day. The only thing I think they could choke up. This phone is maybe the most heavy game on planet Earth, and not even that I think would choke this up. So it's a pretty fast phone.

It just doesn't have the fastest animations I've ever seen. Now you can also customize these phones. You know toggles up here at the top. You have the privacy shade Locker, just like you could do on any other Android phone, so I did want to mention that now get on to the camera. It's the first dual camera on a blackberry as a primary f-18 lens, a secondary f1 over 2.3 inch sensor, and then it has the 1080p 24 30 60 and 4k 24 30 portrait modes and slow motion Doubleday that power button quick launch to get into this camera take a photo just easily or hold it down for the burst mode, and then you have the ability to go in the telephoto zoom. This phone also has a manual mode.

I didn't show it here in this video, but it does have manual mode and that second optical zoom lens is not as sharp as the original camera lens. So keep that in mind when you are taking photos that secondary lens, not as sharp you do have filters here, and you do have other modes like the scanner mode de piano slo-mo video photo and portraits. So there's plenty going on for a blackberry, camera I mean I, haven't seen this on older BlackBerry smartphone. So this is nice. You have the HDR settings aspect ratio, one to one, sixteen to nine four to three and your flash and a timer.

So everything I kind of want to see in an iPhone on to the camera settings we have here on the blackberry, ready to go control mode. You see fine photo quality. You can do focus before it capture. Furthermore, you can also change. The resolutions in here enhance your video stabilization.

If you don't have a tripod to hold your phone on, you have grid lines geolocation, you can mute the sounds media card settings volume. Key capture, I mean everything. Is here right within the camera. You don't have to go hunting for anything. It's all here, all laid out and a pretty nice camera interface.

It doesn't sound that great when you take a photo but the front camera 8, megapixel, f, 2.0, 1080p, 24 30, and you could do panel on the front. They're gonna look at the front-facing camera software very similar to the rear. As a matter of fact, almost identical, HDR aspect settings- you do have your filters down here as well, and, what's really neat, is the panoramic mode for the BlackBerry key to you on the front. I haven't seen this on a lot of other smartphones. As a matter of fact, if you do piano on most smartphones or just flip, you back over to the rear, so that can give you like that wide selfie effect.

So that's pretty cool for the BlackBerry key to you. Don't expect to see that here, but anyway, let's go ahead and take a look at these samples. I took with this phone enjoy now in terms of the battery life. You can see the battery life on the BlackBerry key ? is actually perfect. I don't want to talk too much about it because it was so darn good, there's not much to talk about.

It can go for pretty much two days with it's 3,500 William cell, and it charges very fast. Now. Heavy business users and one day will kill this phone, but it's never gonna. Let you down getting through at least a full day, so a pretty good battery life overall and if you need more, you got the battery saver built in to the Android software. Next up is the storage department.

Now you can expand this thing up to 128, gig and 64. Gig is gonna, be the only available capacity in the US 128 gigs will be coming to other markets, but not to the US, but you can go up to 128 gigs, so that should be plenty of storage for this device, and it's going to be unlocked with that capacity. Now, let's talk, lastly, about the phone call quality. With this phone, you can't have a communications review device without talking about the phone call quality. The signal strength, while not that strong at the moment has been very strong throughout my use case of the device, and I've had no issues using this and with the shortcut keys to dial people really fast.

This is a perfect phone for well a phone. Now the speakerphone can be covered up again because it's not dual speakers that would be nice to see on the next blackberry, but overall definitely a perfect phone had no drop calls. Nobody telling me they couldn't hear me whatsoever when it comes to calling experience. So this is the BlackBerry key ?, it's the ultimate communications device that has the hub, which combines emails, text messages, Instagram messages, Facebook everything in one. It's a great communications device with excellent durability, as it doesn't have a glass back what 7000 series aluminum to make it feel a little more premium, great security, more than other Android phones.

Do you have to offer an iconic keyboard that it's pretty excellent once you do get used to it? It's also a very intelligent keyboard that can really learn as you go and learn how you type and offer up some great suggestions to make it even faster for you, when typing, and also you have some amazing functional shortcuts with an all-new speed key making this very easy to multitask in between application. Android software. On top of it is just the cherry on top and pretty smooth performance overall when using the key -. It's not the best multimedia device for everyone on the whole and I, don't think anybody's going to be buying, is just to be doing video watching. That's not what you buy.

A blackberry for great productivity features with the productivity tab and also this phone also has perfect performance on the whole when it comes to just day-to-day multitasking over the prior key one, great new dual camera overall for blackberry, pretty good I'm actually quite impressed it's the icon reborn the key to, but is it enough for you to pre-order it on June 29th at Amazon or Best Buy for six hundred forty-nine? Ninety-nine releasing on July 13th! That's going to come down to your personal preference, but for me, I definitely think it's worth it because it's its a flagship phone for blackberry. It's not a flagship phone. When you want to say well, it doesn't have Snapdragon 8045, but I. Think it's well worth the money. If you found this video helpful, enjoyable, click that like button for me, if you're new here consider subscribing for more.

Thank you very much for watching, be sure to be well Nick here, helping you to master your technology and peace.

Source : Nick Ackerman