Friends+Design
- Beautiful, solid-feeling design and construction - very BlackBerry-like
- The entire rear is made of a rubberised plastic which offers excellent grip
- The surface of the keyboard is touch-sensitive, a feature carried over from the BlackBerry Passport - you can slide across it to scroll up, down, left or right just like you would on a trackpad - there's also a hybrid component to this keyboard - when typing, you can see three autocomplete suggestions in a row on the bottom of the screen - Swiping upwards on the keyboard below it "flings" that word to where your cursor is
- There is also an integrated a fingerprint sensor in the spacebar
- Relatively thick and heavy - in a universe of sleek metal phones with borderless screens and curved glass everywhere, the KEYone is a bit of a brute
Display
- Decent display - sharp and crisp, with reasonable viewing angles and good-enough brightness for outdoor usage
- Small, cramped display, because of the physical keyboard underneath - and the screen also has an unusual 1080x1620 resolution and 3:2 aspect ratio - making it not a great choice for media consumption, or gaming
Software
- Another feature carried over from classic BlackBerrys that is quite useful is the ability to bind shortcuts to the keyboard - you can short-press or long-press each of the letter keys and choose to trigger an app, toggle a setting, or a call a specific contact - you can even set up shortcuts to actions within apps, such as opening a new note, setting a new alarm, composing a BBM message to a contact, or playing a specific playlist - this gives you a total of 52 customisable shortcuts plus the Convenience Key on the side!
- On the software side, there is BlackBerry's customised Android skin with some neat touches such as the ability to swipe on home screen icons to show widgets associated with their apps, and a huge number of direct shortcuts - any action that can be assigned to the keyboard keys can also be triggered with a custom home screen icon
- The optimization of software to hardware could have been done better - for instance you can't just start typing even when it would be obvious to do so - like you should be able to start searching through the Play Store or typing into a new browser tab's URL field immediately - instead, you have to tap each field to activate it first, like you were pulling up an on-screen keyboard - this is unnecessary friction
Performance
- If like for most people, a touchscreen keyboard is now second nature to you, the hardware KEYone keyboard might not be a clear-cut improvement - and it will definitely take some getting used to
- Apps run smoothly and multitasking isn't a problem, but you definitely don't get a flagship-class level of performance here - the Snapdragon 625 processor found here is more commonly seen on phones under Rs. 20k
Camera
- Decent rear camera - performs well under daylight conditions
- Video recording is pretty solid too
- While daylight camera performance is decent, photos taken at night tended to be blurry thanks to much longer shutter times, and ISO values also vary wildly between shots taken in immediate succession, leading to inconsistent results
Audio
- The bottom-firing speaker doesn't get very loud
Battery
- Good battery life - you should comfortably get a a full day of usage even with heavy use
- Quick charging support with Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0
More
- The main attraction of this phone of course is its physical keyboard - it is intuitive, smart, and on the whole, quite satisfying - people who miss the days of the physical QWERTY keyboard will certainly enjoy it
- The BlackBerry Hub acts as a useful communication hub and shows all your messages and emails across accounts and services
- On the whole, you would really have to value the hardware keyboard and the business like productivity approach of the BlackBerry, above things like having a large screen and slim body, not to mention the general performance and camera quality of a high-end phone, for the KeyOne to make sense - for most users, a phone like OnePlus 5 in this price bracket will be a better choice
