BlackBerry patent suggests upcoming smartphone offers authentication via touch keyboard

File this under maybes since there's no way to tell if BlackBerry is still interested to add new features and improvements to its smartphones now that the Canadian entity decided to become a software-only company.

Some of you might recall our previous reports highlighting some of the features the unannounced BlackBerry Mercury has to offer in terms of hardware. Well, it looks like there's more to it than we've originally thought.

A new patent published on October 13 suggests that BlackBerry might include an authentication system based on a touch-sensitive keyboard. The pictures attached to the patent show a traditional BlackBerry device with a 3-row keyboard, but the description of the patent provides us with more information on the new security feature BlackBerry phones might employ in the future.



According to the patent, the application developed by BlackBerry is definitely related to authentication for access to a device and specifically to authentication using a touch-sensitive keyboard.

We doubt that this form of authentication will be part of the upcoming DTEK60, which has yet to be officially released on the market, but there's a high chance that BlackBerry will allow third-party manufacturers to include it in future models.