[Kate_Johnson]

I am looking for a change in the brand. What are the latest features in the blackberry?

[Farmbboy]

Empty promises and disappointment. But that's not new.

[conite]

I am looking for a change in the brand. What are the latest features in the blackberry?

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly.

BlackBerry switched to Android 4 years ago, and got out of the handset business entirely 3 years ago.

Another company, TCL, is currently liquidating the remaining stock of the BlackBerry-branded devices they produced over the last 2 years, under licence from BlackBerry Limited, and looks like they are retiring the brand.

[Kate_Johnson]

I was asking about the blackberry phone.
You are talking about android, what best I can see there?

[zer0ten]

The last BlackBerry OS phone was released almost 5 years ago....The Leap.....and it was basically a refresh of a phone from 7 years ago....The Z10.

The OS still remains but there's been nothing new for many years.

[gebco]

keyboard shortcuts, email and message management in the Inbox app are a couple of features I can think of.

[Chuck Finley69]

At this point, if you're having to ask for BlackBerry features/benefits, it's probably not the brand for you.

[bh7171]

OP its unfortunate you cannot get a straightforward answer. BlackBerry (Mobile) a subsidiary of TCL makes and manufacturers the Blackberry Key line of PKB devices. (Also an all touch called the Motion). The key devices run a near stock version of Android that runs and operates very well. All devices have great battery life, are secure (were and are supported for 24 months with security patches) and if you desire and prefer a PKB smartphone they are the only way to go. The '18-19 models are discounted (like EVERY OTHER '18-19 smartphone). if you prefer a PKB give one a go. Security patches will be less than other Android offerings but none have a PKB. In early '20 we will know if the Key2 will have a successor.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I am looking for a change in the brand. What are the latest features in the blackberry?

Brand is sorta done and over....

Current phones are done under licensing and run a BlackBerry Secured version of Android... all signs point to this partnership ending with the KEY2 and KEY2 LE from last year being the last. The are still getting security patches, but they are stuck on Android 8...

Past phones sold by BlackBerry

• Android (PRIV, and DTEKs) were sold back in 2015/2016 and no longer being updated.
• BB10 were sold back in 2013/2016 and are no longer being updated, and will be EOL at the end of the year.
• BBOS were sold back pre-2014, updates were ended long ago and it was EOL last year. Requied BIS, which is a carrier service that isn't supported by all carriers anymore.

If you are looking to switch brands, this isn't one with much of a future. Still some life in it, but will depend on which phone you get - what carrier you use - and how little you can get by with.

If you are coming from iOS or Android and you want apps... you need to stick to the Android BlackBerries. BB10 would be fine only if you don't need apps other than the basics of email, phone and text. BBOS I wouldn't even suggest.

[the_boon]

Brand is sorta done and over....

Current phones are done under licensing and run a BlackBerry Secured version of Android... all signs point to this partnership ending with the KEY2 and KEY2 LE from last year being the last. The are still getting security patches, but they are stuck on Android 8...

Past phones sold by BlackBerry

• Android (PRIV, and DTEKs) were sold back in 2015/2016 and no longer being updated.
• BB10 were sold back in 2013/2016 and are no longer being updated, and will be EOL at the end of the year.
• BBOS were sold back pre-2014, updates were ended long ago and it was EOL last year. Requied BIS, which is a carrier service that isn't supported by all carriers anymore.

If you are looking to switch brands, this isn't one with much of a future. Still some life in it, but will depend on which phone you get - what carrier you use - and how little you can get by with.

If you are coming from iOS or Android and you want apps... you need to stick to the Android BlackBerries. BB10 would be fine only if you don't need apps other than the basics of email, phone and text. BBOS I wouldn't even suggest.

There's still plenty of life left in the KEY2, KEY2 LE and KEYone Black Edition.

Unless by plenty of life you mean plenty of security updates, because most likely the updates for the KEY2 will stop in July 2020 and the ones for the LE in October 2020.

If you like the form factor and especially the keyboard, I wouldn't let that deter you from buying one.
These are extremely enjoyable devices to use if you value accurate and tactile mobile typing.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

There's still plenty of life left in the KEY2, KEY2 LE and KEYone Black Edition.

Unless by plenty of life you mean plenty of security updates, because most likely the updates for the KEY2 will stop in July 2020 and the ones for the LE in October 2020.

If you like the form factor and especially the keyboard, I wouldn't let that deter you from buying one.
These are extremely enjoyable devices to use if you value accurate and tactile mobile typing.

If OP is switching brands... I'm assuming they aren't big PKB users. What was the last PKB without the BlackBerry name on it?

[the_boon]

If OP is switching brands... I'm assuming they aren't big PKB users. What was the last PKB without the BlackBerry name on it?

The Samsung S8 with the keyboard cover?

The iPhone 5S/SE with the Typo keyboard cover??

The Samsung Galaxy Ch@t from 2012 running Android Jelly Bean at best???

Jokes aside, ok I get your point

[Troy Tiscareno]

I am looking for a change in the brand. What are the latest features in the blackberry?

As others have said, the "newest" BB-branded phone is 1.5 years old already, and that's the Key2 LE. It's an Android phone with a physical keyboard at the bottom, and is kind of a less expensive, feature-reduced version of the Key2 (the non-LE version), which is a bit older but has a few additional specs, most notably the capacitive physical keyboard, which allows you to swipe on the physical buttons to move the cursor or the page, similar to a track pad on a laptop. The LE version lacks this.

The main attraction of a BB phone at this point is the physical keyboard - real buttons that you press to type instead of a virtual keyboard on a glass screen - but BB also adds some additional security (which has pluses and minuses, depending on your viewpoint), and pre-loads some of BB's Android apps, such as the Hub, which is designed as a universal email client to make managing email easier.

As a potential new user, though, it's also important to understand the state of the brand: it's very likely to have ended with the K2LE. BB themselves left the device business in 2016, and the recent phones have been made under license by China's TCL. That licensing agreement has pretty clearly failed and no newer phones have been released and aren't likely to be.

As far as BB's prior platforms, they are both EOL (End of Life), with support for BB10 ending in 25 days, though BB10 hasn't really had any significant development since 2014. Unless your needs are limited to texting and email, which these phones still do very well, it's pretty much a hobbyist's platform today, with lots of work-arounds needed to get apps and services working, and with apps and services ending support for the platform almost on a daily basis as new versions of the apps are released requiring a higher version of Android than those old devices supported - native BB10 apps have mostly been unsupported for years, and the better paid versions have been unavailable for a year as the app store's payment mechanism was shut off, and the whole app store is scheduled to be shut down in 25 days, so BB10 users are largely left trying to run Android apps on the Android v4.3 emulator built in to the OS. Trying to find a new BB10 phone is also challenging since the newest one was manufactured in early 2015, so you'd probably be looking for a used one if you were determined to try it out.

In 2015, BB officially stopped making BB10 phones and switched to the Android platform with the Priv, a vertical slider phone. In 2016, they released BB-branded versions of the TCL-made Alcatel Idol 4 (as the BB DTEK 50) and Idol 4s (as the BB DTEK 60), which were all-touch devices. In 2016, BB officially left the device manufacturing business, licensing out a set of patents, in particular their PKB designs, their Android apps, and their security modifications to Android, to 3 licensees, by far the largest being TCL. TCL created a subdivision called BlackBerry Mobile (BBMo) to manage these phones and to manufacture the phones for the other two (much smaller) licensees. At this time, they also took over support for the DTEK phones from BB, as BB wanted to close down their internal hardware support infrastructure and as TCL was the manufacturer of the phones anyway.

TCL, under the BBMo banner, released 4 phones with BB's flavor of Android: the KeyOne, the Motion, the KeyTwo, and the KeyTwoLE. All of the Key phones were portrait PKB phones, while the Motion was an all-touch phone. Retail interest in the Motion was very low, and only a small number were manufactured, and they were sold out after about 6 months of being on the market. The Key series has been relatively much more popular, but with still low sales volumes and steeply declining sales year-to-year, to the point where 2019 total device sales for BBMo will only be about 100,000 devices. As such, TCL effectively shuttered BBMo at the beginning of the year and has not paid BB to do the work for the Android OS upgrade to Pie that Key2 and Key2LE users were expecting. They also don't show any signs of releasing any further devices, preferring to run out the clock on their 5 year licensing deal.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I am looking for a change in the brand. What are the latest features in the blackberry?

What are you looking for, other than a change in brand?

[bh7171]

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly.

BlackBerry switched to Android 4 years ago, and got out of the handset business entirely 3 years ago.

Another company, TCL, is currently liquidating the remaining stock of the BlackBerry-branded devices they produced over the last 2 years, under licence from BlackBerry Limited, and looks like they are retiring the brand.

Odd response like many others that followed. 🤔 The OP question was "What are the latest features in a Blackberry"

[conite]

Odd response like many others that followed. The OP question was "What are the latest features in a Blackberry"

Depends what the OP considers "latest". Does she mean BB10? Is she aware of BlackBerry Android? Does she know that there is nothing new coming down the pike?

I had hoped the history lesson would clarify the question, provide context, and warn of the potential issues.

[bh7171]

Depends what the OP considers "latest". Does he mean BB10? Is he aware of BlackBerry Android? Does he know that there is nothing new coming down the pike?

I had hoped the history lesson would clarify the question, provide context, and warn of the potential issues.

But the OP did not ask for the history and possible future of Blackberry branded smartphones. Perhaps when the OP returns to the initial question we will garner clarity?

[John Albert]

As others have said, the "newest" BB-branded phone is 1.5 years old already, and that's the Key2 LE. It's an Android phone with a physical keyboard at the bottom, and is kind of a less expensive, feature-reduced version of the Key2 (the non-LE version), which is a bit older but has a few additional specs, most notably the capacitive physical keyboard, which allows you to swipe on the physical buttons to move the cursor or the page, similar to a track pad on a laptop. The LE version lacks this.

The main attraction of a BB phone at this point is the physical keyboard - real buttons that you press to type instead of a virtual keyboard on a glass screen - but BB also adds some additional security (which has pluses and minuses, depending on your viewpoint), and pre-loads some of BB's Android apps, such as the Hub, which is designed as a universal email client to make managing email easier.

As a potential new user, though, it's also important to understand the state of the brand: it's very likely to have ended with the K2LE. BB themselves left the device business in 2016, and the recent phones have been made under license by China's TCL. That licensing agreement has pretty clearly failed and no newer phones have been released and aren't likely to be.

As far as BB's prior platforms, they are both EOL (End of Life), with support for BB10 ending in 25 days, though BB10 hasn't really had any significant development since 2014. Unless your needs are limited to texting and email, which these phones still do very well, it's pretty much a hobbyist's platform today, with lots of work-arounds needed to get apps and services working, and with apps and services ending support for the platform almost on a daily basis as new versions of the apps are released requiring a higher version of Android than those old devices supported - native BB10 apps have mostly been unsupported for years, and the better paid versions have been unavailable for a year as the app store's payment mechanism was shut off, and the whole app store is scheduled to be shut down in 25 days, so BB10 users are largely left trying to run Android apps on the Android v4.3 emulator built in to the OS. Trying to find a new BB10 phone is also challenging since the newest one was manufactured in early 2015, so you'd probably be looking for a used one if you were determined to try it out.

In 2015, BB officially stopped making BB10 phones and switched to the Android platform with the Priv, a vertical slider phone. In 2016, they released BB-branded versions of the TCL-made Alcatel Idol 4 (as the BB DTEK 50) and Idol 4s (as the BB DTEK 60), which were all-touch devices. In 2016, BB officially left the device manufacturing business, licensing out a set of patents, in particular their PKB designs, their Android apps, and their security modifications to Android, to 3 licensees, by far the largest being TCL. TCL created a subdivision called BlackBerry Mobile (BBMo) to manage these phones and to manufacture the phones for the other two (much smaller) licensees. At this time, they also took over support for the DTEK phones from BB, as BB wanted to close down their internal hardware support infrastructure and as TCL was the manufacturer of the phones anyway.

TCL, under the BBMo banner, released 4 phones with BB's flavor of Android: the KeyOne, the Motion, the KeyTwo, and the KeyTwoLE. All of the Key phones were portrait PKB phones, while the Motion was an all-touch phone. Retail interest in the Motion was very low, and only a small number were manufactured, and they were sold out after about 6 months of being on the market. The Key series has been relatively much more popular, but with still low sales volumes and steeply declining sales year-to-year, to the point where 2019 total device sales for BBMo will only be about 100,000 devices. As such, TCL effectively shuttered BBMo at the beginning of the year and has not paid BB to do the work for the Android OS upgrade to Pie that Key2 and Key2LE users were expecting. They also don't show any signs of releasing any further devices, preferring to run out the clock on their 5 year licensing deal.

This post is so great.
It is s brief summary of BlackBerry story. I enjoyed reading every word in it.

[Chuck Finley69]

But the OP did not ask for the history and possible future of Blackberry branded smartphones. Perhaps when the OP returns to the initial question we will garner clarity?

The OP wasn’t clear so we’re prodding this along for the similarly inquisitive that are quietly observing....

[nevilleadaniels]

As others have said, the "newest" BB-branded phone is 1.5 years old already, and that's the Key2 LE. It's an Android phone with a physical keyboard at the bottom, and is kind of a less expensive, feature-reduced version of the Key2 (the non-LE version), which is a bit older but has a few additional specs, most notably the capacitive physical keyboard, which allows you to swipe on the physical buttons to move the cursor or the page, similar to a track pad on a laptop. The LE version lacks this.

The main attraction of a BB phone at this point is the physical keyboard - real buttons that you press to type instead of a virtual keyboard on a glass screen - but BB also adds some additional security (which has pluses and minuses, depending on your viewpoint), and pre-loads some of BB's Android apps, such as the Hub, which is designed as a universal email client to make managing email easier.

As a potential new user, though, it's also important to understand the state of the brand: it's very likely to have ended with the K2LE. BB themselves left the device business in 2016, and the recent phones have been made under license by China's TCL. That licensing agreement has pretty clearly failed and no newer phones have been released and aren't likely to be.

As far as BB's prior platforms, they are both EOL (End of Life), with support for BB10 ending in 25 days, though BB10 hasn't really had any significant development since 2014. Unless your needs are limited to texting and email, which these phones still do very well, it's pretty much a hobbyist's platform today, with lots of work-arounds needed to get apps and services working, and with apps and services ending support for the platform almost on a daily basis as new versions of the apps are released requiring a higher version of Android than those old devices supported - native BB10 apps have mostly been unsupported for years, and the better paid versions have been unavailable for a year as the app store's payment mechanism was shut off, and the whole app store is scheduled to be shut down in 25 days, so BB10 users are largely left trying to run Android apps on the Android v4.3 emulator built in to the OS. Trying to find a new BB10 phone is also challenging since the newest one was manufactured in early 2015, so you'd probably be looking for a used one if you were determined to try it out.

In 2015, BB officially stopped making BB10 phones and switched to the Android platform with the Priv, a vertical slider phone. In 2016, they released BB-branded versions of the TCL-made Alcatel Idol 4 (as the BB DTEK 50) and Idol 4s (as the BB DTEK 60), which were all-touch devices. In 2016, BB officially left the device manufacturing business, licensing out a set of patents, in particular their PKB designs, their Android apps, and their security modifications to Android, to 3 licensees, by far the largest being TCL. TCL created a subdivision called BlackBerry Mobile (BBMo) to manage these phones and to manufacture the phones for the other two (much smaller) licensees. At this time, they also took over support for the DTEK phones from BB, as BB wanted to close down their internal hardware support infrastructure and as TCL was the manufacturer of the phones anyway.

TCL, under the BBMo banner, released 4 phones with BB's flavor of Android: the KeyOne, the Motion, the KeyTwo, and the KeyTwoLE. All of the Key phones were portrait PKB phones, while the Motion was an all-touch phone. Retail interest in the Motion was very low, and only a small number were manufactured, and they were sold out after about 6 months of being on the market. The Key series has been relatively much more popular, but with still low sales volumes and steeply declining sales year-to-year, to the point where 2019 total device sales for BBMo will only be about 100,000 devices. As such, TCL effectively shuttered BBMo at the beginning of the year and has not paid BB to do the work for the Android OS upgrade to Pie that Key2 and Key2LE users were expecting. They also don't show any signs of releasing any further devices, preferring to run out the clock on their 5 year licensing deal.

BB Key2 Red released April 2019 with build dates upto June 2019 I have seen.

[conite]

BB Key2 Red released April 2019 with build dates upto June 2019 I have seen.

"Assembly/flash" dates - NOT "build" dates.

[Troy Tiscareno]

BB Key2 Red released April 2019 with build dates upto June 2019 I have seen.

Yes, but they weren't really new production.

Manufacturers are required to hold back a certain percentage of produced components to have on hand for spare parts, in case there is a big problem and lots of parts are needed. By 6 months after launch, if no such problems have cropped up, those parts can be released (a much smaller amount of spares must be kept for 3 years after launch). And as many companies do, BB took those spare parts and built them into phones - in this case making a small run of red cases and PKBs and then using the spare parts to assemble an estimated 500-800 of the red K2s.

And while that might have been a week or two of assembly work for a small team of workers, it's not anything like "putting the phone back into production" - all actual production occurred in mid-2018.

The firmware date is not the manufacturing date, it's the date that the firmware was most recently loaded on the phone. Since that is typically done just before packaging, it's best to consider it a packaging date. Because there are many different firmware variations (look at the huge list of PRD numbers, which are different firmwares unique to a specific carrier or region), but only a handful of different hardware (radio/antenna packages for different carriers/regions), a given piece of hardware may have 15 or 20 different firmwares that can be loaded on it. Typically, the phones aren't flashed with a specific firmware until they have orders from a carrier or distributer for a certain region - before that, they are produced and stored in bulk-packs with no firmware loaded and with no retail packaging, so that as orders come in, stock and be pulled and localize firmware can be flashed before packaging the phone in localized packaging.

We can also see that as retailers have returned unsold stock to BBMo, BBMo has in some cases opened those boxes and reflashed the phones for sale in a different country/region/carrier than it was originally configured for. BBMo is essentially moving the remaining product to areas with the most demand, as their goal is to sell every phone produced for as close to full retail as possible, to maximize revenues and minimize the losses they took on the BB licensing deal. That's why you see a few very recent dates on phones that were actually produced more than a year ago.