Whereas most of us had our hopes pinned on TCL Communication Expertise Holdings (TCT) unveiling the much-awaited BlackBerry QWERTY smartphone at CES 2017, it seems we should wait some time longer. The corporate has introduced that whereas the Android smartphone will probably be previewed at CES, will probably be launched at MWC subsequent month.

TCT in a press release on Wednesday revealed that amongst the primary smartphones it should launch this is the “newest BlackBerry smartphone”, mentioned to be centered on “safety, productiveness and reliability.” It went on to say the smartphone will probably be previewed at CES, which it indeed did, revealing that it is codename is Mercury as we have been listening to all alongside. The corporate additionally revealed that the spacebar has a fingerprint sensor constructed into it, whereas the keyboard itself has capacitive contact capabilities for scrolling. It should additionally function a USB Sort-C port for charging and information transfers, and it’ll run Android Nougat.

As for the MWC launch, Steve Cistulli, President and Normal Supervisor for TCL Communication (TCT), North America, in a press release mentioned, “We sit up for unveiling particulars round this distinctly completely different and impressively designed BlackBerry smartphone across the Cell World Congress timeframe subsequent month.”

Cistulli had teased the BlackBerry smartphone in a video earlier this week, and on Wednesday shared one more video on Twitter, exhibiting the QWERTY smartphone from a number of angles.

Another look… #BlackBerryMobile #CES2017 pic.twitter.com/dSjVuMWd35

— Steve Cistulli (@SteveCistulli) January 4, 2017

To recall, BlackBerry in September announced it could cease making smartphones, and as an alternative utterly outsource their design and manufacturing whereas licensing the model to third-parties. CEO John Chen then revealed that one final keyboard cellphone can be launched by the corporate. The primary companion to come on board was TCL (now often called TCT) in December. Later that month, TCT had teased that it could reveal extra particulars at CES 2017 in regards to the how the BlackBerry model legacy will dwell on. We have now come full circle.

The BlackBerry Mercury aka BlackBerry DTEK70 aka BlackBerry Press has been rumoured for some time, and a number of other leaks have occurred within the current previous.

The smartphone is predicted to run on Android 7.0 Nougat, sport a 4.5-inch (1080×1620 pixel) show, and be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC coupled with 3GB of RAM. It is anticipated to come back with 32GB of inbuilt storage that is expandable by way of microSD card, and sport an 18-megapixel rear digital camera aside from an 8-megapixel entrance digital camera.