Romdhane Marble

The other day, we told you that TCL was going to be designing, manufacturing, selling, promoting and handling customer service for BlackBerry's new handsets. Considering that the BlackBerry DTEK50 and BlackBerry DTEK60 are both actually re-branded TCL related phones (the former is the Alcatel Idol 4 and the latter is the TCL 950. Alcatel is a joint venture between TCL and Alcatel-Lucent), this is a process that has already begun. BlackBerry CEO John Chen has said that he would honor his promise to release one last home-grown model sporting a physical QWERTY keyboard. And while images of a phone called the BlackBerry Mercury have been disseminated, something more exciting appears to be on the way. First of all, some of TCL's Twitter accounts have been using the hashtag #TheNewBlackBerry along with the image that you'll find in the slideshow. And secondly, a cryptic tweet from Steve Cistulli, the President and GM of TCL Communication i...

BlackBerry has signed over (mostly) global rights to use its branding on phones to Chinese manufacturer TCL. The news follows an announcement by the Canadian company in September that it would stop making its own phones and concentrate instead on services and software. Under the terms of the agreement, TCL will “design, manufacture, sell, and provide customer support for BlackBerry-branded mobile devices,” while BlackBerry will chip in with the software and services. The deal is being touted as “global,” but there are some limitations: it won’t apply in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, or Indonesia. According to  Bloomberg , this is because Blackberry already has a licensing agreement in place in Indonesia, and is currently working on another deal with an Indian company. It’s also interesting to note that this isn’t TCL’s first outing at the buying-defunct-smartphone-brands rodeo — it previously purchased Palm back in January this year (bu...

Available in the US  and other markets since earlier this week, the  BlackBerry DTEK60  is a high-end smartphone that costs less than your typical high-end handset from major companies. The DTEK60 is priced at $499 unlocked, and offers quite a lot for that kind of money, including an aluminum and glass body, a 5.5-inch Quad HD screen, a Snapdragon 820 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and so on.  In a video interview, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard said that the company's "very proud" of the DTEK60, and that the handset can go head to head with other 5.5-inch phones like the  iPhone 7 Plus  and  Google Pixel XL . In fact, Marty Beard argues that the DTEK60 has some advantages. Besides being about $200 cheaper, the BlackBerry DTEK60 is a bit smaller and thinner than the iPhone 7 Plus and Pixel XL, and, thanks to BlackBerry's software (integrated into Android), it's also an "incredibly secure phone." Moreover, Mr. Beard says the DTEK60 has better battery life than the iPh...