BlackBerry Comes Roaring Back With a New Version of Its Classic ‘QWERTY’ Keyboard

Let’s just admit it: most touchscreen keyboards suck. If you are just old enough to remember the heyday of the cleverly-designed original BlackBerry smart phone, you recall that one of the best things about it was its concrete usefulness, embodied by the physical QWERTY keyboard and the track ball. As fantastic as the mini super computers we keep in our pockets now can be, it’s hard to not feel they’ve lost something, too. That something may be back with the newly-revealed BlackBerry Mercury.  

Yes, BlackBerry began 2017 with a bang. On Thursday they let the cat out of the bag fully revealing the Mercury, and it looks pretty sweet. 

The phone’s specs stack up pretty well against the iPhone and the many flavors of Samsung Galaxy phones. It’s got a 4.5 inch, 1080×1620 pixel display and comes bearing 3GB of RAM, 32 gigs of on-board storage space, and perhaps most impressively in an age when cameras are becoming a crucial smart phone feature, an 8-megapixel camera on the front end with 18 megapixels on the back. 

BlackBerry once thoroughly dominated the smart phone market, but struggled mightily after the advent of the iPhone and Samsung’s subsequent flood of Android alternatives. The Mercury could be a bold move to re-capture some of the product’s former glory. With Apple fans growing frustrated with the iPhone’s lack of innovation, and Samsung taking a huge hit with its unfortunately fiery Galaxy Note 7, BlackBerry could be back at the top before you know it with a product like this.