BlackBerry updates the DTEK lineup with the new DTEK60 with 5.5-inch display

Just as the company is about to become irrelevant, BlackBerry breaks out by launching new devices powered by Android making a significant departure from its long-standing BlackBerry OS that reigned with the company’s devices for years. With Android though, BlackBerry still features all its renowned security features including its famous blackberry keys either physical or its virtual keyboard including with their new Android smartphones.

Last year was the company’s first device dedicated to run Android operating system with the BlackBerry Priv but it wasn’t until the second quarter of this year that BlackBerry launched a full-touchscreen BB devices with its DTEK handsets. However last month, the company announced that it will shift its focus on software and would stop producing phones and instead licence the BlackBerry brand to other manufacturers to produce the hardware for them. This brought the DTEK50 to go live into the market which offers mid-range specs and a 5.2-inch display. Now, the company already made a follow for that initial launch and recently unveiled the new DTEK60 device with a larger 5.5-inch display and an overall better hardware specs that the DTEK50.

The new DTEK60 handset may look familiar for some, that’s because BlackBerry collaborated TCL, the owner of Alcatel-Lucent that produces the Alcatel Idol series of devices, more likely with the Alcatel Idol 4S but BlackBerry went out further and offers high-end specs. Like we’ve said above, it comes with a large 5.5-inch display with 2K resolutions and features a metal-frame plus glass build and design.

The handset is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Quad-core processor coupled to 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage space. For users that required more storage than the one offered by the device, there’s a microSD card slot that accepts up to 2TB of microSD cards.

The new handset will also feature a better camera than its smaller sibling at 21 megapixel and features PDAF and Dual-LED flash. There’s 4K video recording support at 30fps and slow-mo in 720p at 120fps. On the front, is comes with an 8 Megapixel shooter for Selfies and video calls.

It runs on an embedded 3000 mAh Li-Ion battery and operates on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) with BlackBerry own flavor of the OS on top. With BlackBerry defined features, it’s all worth noting that the DTEK50 and DTEK60 all comes with unique BlackBerry designed UI elements and security features together with the devices built-in fingerprint sensor and data encryption schemes.

The new BlackBerry DTEK60 will be available for $499 off-contract, though this device is available to anyone, BlackBerry is still the same company dedicated to the business market and with BlackBerry continued collaboration with a number of participating companies and enterprises, it is most likely that one will get hold of a BlackBerry DTEK device working on those participating business companies.

Locally, the BlackBerry DTEK50 is currently sold in retail outlets from 13-14K so for the higher-end model as the DTEK60 will all those upgrades, expect them to come around 23-25K when they become available in our shores.

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• Blackberry announces higher-end DTEK60 for $499(neowin.net)

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• BlackBerry’s 5.5-inch DTEK60 is the company’s nicest smartphone to date, but is it enough?(techcrunch.com)

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