Pay your last respects to the real BlackBerry before everything gets outsourced to TCL.

BlackBerry is done making smartphone hardware. The company said last year it would "end all internal hardware development" and "pivot to software." The brand will still appear on hardware, as it is "outsourcing" the BlackBerry brand to Chinese electronics company TCL. We've seen this happen already with the "BlackBerry" DTEK line, which so far has taken bog-standard TCL smartphone designs and slapped a BlackBerry logo on them.

Before BlackBerry bows out of the phone hardware market, the company has one last in-house design left: the Blackberry "Mercury." Today the phone is just being teased. We don't have any specs, and "Mercury" might not even be the final name (DTEK70 gets thrown around a lot in leaks), but at CES TCL is showing off a QWERTY-bar Blackberry phone that runs Android 7.0 Nougat.

The Priv looked like a typical smartphone when closed, but pulling on the bottom revealed a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Mercury changes up the design by shrinking the screen and affixing the keyboard to the front of the device, just like an old school BlackBerry phone. Crackberry managed to go hands-on with the phone, which it describes as a metal body with a soft touch back. There's a USB Type C port on the bottom, and BlackBerry has cleverly hidden the fingerprint reader inside the space bar.

Given that the phone's release and media run up are being handled by TCL, it seems as if the company has already taken over for BlackBerry's hardware business. We know this is an in-house BlackBerry project, though—earlier the Mercury was leaked as the "BlackBerry Rome" before any of this "exiting the smartphone market" stuff came to light. Smartphone development has a multi-month pipeline, so it looks like BlackBerry is wrapping up one last device before it exits the market.

Back when this was the "BlackBerry Rome," it was described as a "mid-range" product and was expected to come in at the $400 price point. We'll have to see what the real specs and pricing are like when the TCL is ready to talk, which will apparently be at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.

Source: Arstechnica