Unihertz teases BlackBerry KEY2 style phone possibly with 5G

Since BlackBerry never gave OnwardMobility the chance to make the 5G BlackBerry it promised by pulling the license it had bestowed upon the company, you will never see a 5G BlackBerry unless some sort of miracle takes place. After all, BlackBerry sold its remaining smartphone assets for $600 million early this year.

However, there is still at least one company making BlackBerry-like handsets, physical keyboards, and all, and it just tweeted a teaser revealing that a new BlackBerry-esque phone is coming soon. That company is Unihertz which in 2019 released its Titan. With a form factor straight from the BlackBerry Passport including the nearly square 4.5-inch display, Unihertz even borrowed the Passport's wide QWERTY keyboard which was a hybrid of physical buttons and contextual virtual touchscreen keys.

For example, you could use the physical QWERTY to type letters, but if you needed to type punctuation or other special keys, you would have to look on top of the physical keyboard where certain touchscreen typing options would appear based on the content on the display.

Powered by Android, the Titan had everything that BlackBerry fans would want on a real 'Berry including access to the Google Play Store, IP67 water and dust resistance, and a huge 6000mAh battery. But if there was one complaint, it was that the size of the phone was too large and the device was too heavy. So last year Unihertz brought out a smaller and lighter version of the Titan which removed the comparison to the BlackBerry Passport but still included a physical keyboard.

To reiterate, last week, Unihertz teased a new BlackBerry-style phone on Twitter. The tweet shows a black background with the words "Coming soon..." and there is a small area where light reveals a bit of what is hiding in the dark and it looks like a new BlackBerry-style handset with a physical keyboard. Several Twitter subscribers were able to discover exactly what was under the darkness and it looks very much like a BlackBerry KEY2 clone with some changes made to the QWERTY.

The BlackBerry KEY2 was a more refined version of the BlackBerry KEYone which was made by BlackBerry licensee TCL. Fairly popular, the device was considered a success even though only 850,000 units shipped. It was still enough for TCL to develop the KEY2.

And it seems that a Key2 clone could be the next phone that Unihertz will unveil soon. And perhaps it will over 5G connectivity.