After introducing the BlackBerry KEYone smartphone in the Indian market in August, the Canadian smartphone manufacturer Blackberry on Monday announced the launch of its latest mid-range handset, called the “BlackBerry Motion” at the GITEX Technology Week exhibition held in Dubai. BlackBerry Motion is the company’s third Android-powered smartphone after BlackBerry Aurora and BlackBerry KEYone. If you don’t aware of this, BlackBerry has already closed its hardware business but that doesn’t mean that it is out of it. The company now has TCL, the Chinese hardware maker company which has a global agreement with BlackBerry in Canada to produce handsets. TCL’s agreement holds the right to manufacture and sell BlackBerry smartphones in most of the world with the exception of a few countries in Asia. As for pricing and availability, the TCL-made BlackBerry Motion has been priced at Dh 1,699 (Rs. 30,200) in UAE and 1,699 Saudi Riyal (Rs. 29,590) in Saudi Arabia. The smartphone will be available in the Middle East via the various mobile carriers including Axiom Telecom and Etisalat starting from this month. It is now already available for pre-order from all leading retailers in the UAE and will be available in other markets sometime later.
Talking about its design, the BlackBerry Motion sports an anodized aluminium frame with a soft touch textured back for easy and comfortable grip. The BlackBerry Motion features a customizable Smart Convenience Key and a fingerprint sensor that is housed underneath the Home button of the device. Apart from this, the smartphone also comes with some decent specifications with the great software, security and productivity suite including DTEK security suite and support for FIPS 140-2 Full Disk Encryption.
As far as specifications are concerned, the BlackBerry Motion comes equipped with a 5.5-inch full-HD IPS display with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and has a pixel density of 403ppi. Further, the display is protected by a scratch-resistant DragonTrail glass. Under the hood, the device is powered by a 2.0GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor paired with Adreno 506 GPU to handle the graphics. In terms of memory, the BlackBerry Motion is backed up by a 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 2TB via a microSD card slot. Talking about its software fronts, the BlackBerry Motion runs on Google’s Android 7.1.1 Nougat operating system out-of-the-box (upgradable to Android 8.0 Oreo OS). For biometric authentication process, the phone also features a front-mounted fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button. The company also claims that the fingerprint scanner also works with wet fingers.
For photography, BlackBerry Motion features a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with Sony IMX378 sensor, an f/2.0 aperture, 1.55μm pixel size, PDAF (Phase Detection Autofocus), dual-tone LED Flash and 4K video recording support. On the front, the smartphone bears an 8-megapixel front-facing camera with an f/2.2 aperture for capturing selfies and making video calls.
In terms of connectivity, the dual-SIM supported BlackBerry Motion offers various connectivity options including 4G LTE with VoLTE, Wi-Fi dual-band 802.11ac (2.4 & 5.0 GHz), GPS/A-GPS/GLONASS, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, a 3.5mm audio jack and a USB Type-C port for superfast charging and data transfer. On the battery front, the BlackBerry Motion comes packed with a 4,000mAh battery with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 technology support for fast charging. The Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging technology lets you charge up to 50 percent in just 40 minutes and claims to deliver up to 32 hours of battery life on random usage. The smartphone also comes with an IP67 certification that means the BlackBerry Motion is water resistant and dust resistant. Dimensionally, the handset measures 155.7 x 75.4 x 8.13 mm.
