When a BlackBerry isn’t a BlackBerry

Five years ago, no one would have believed a BlackBerry smartphone would go around looking like a regular Android phone. Nor that it would actually be running on Android. But recently, the company that made smartphones what they are changed course and decided to dump the idea of making smartphones on its own or even phones based on its BlackBerry OS and instead get others to do it. BlackBerry is now a software company and that’s what it’s going to focus on. Right on cue, after one Android phone, the Priv, that didn’t quite do the trick, the company has launched two phones, the DTEK50 and DTEK60 for those who might want a touch of BlackBerry with their Android.

Totally gone is the old iconic look of the BlackBerry, with its famous clicky QWERTY keyboard. You won’t know the DTEK60 was a BlackBerry phone if you didn’t turn it over and see the prominent much-loved logo. It’s impossible not to feel a surge of sadness and nostalgia as one looks at the front, a regular smartphone very much from the present times. I feel tearful and I wasn’t even a BlackBerry user! But times must change and accordingly I hold in my hands a slim glassy device with a bit of a curve on top and at the bottom. It’s very slippery, so easy does it with this 5.5-inch newcomer. It’s, however, narrow enough to be easily gripped. Be prepared for a lot of wiping as you get fingerprints off it and also be careful how you lay it down on a table because the camera sticks out a fair bit though the lens is said to be recessed enough to not get damaged.

The power button, unusually, is on the left, on this device. It’s difficult to get used to this position but you can always double-tap the screen to wake or turn off. You also have a fingerprint scanner on the back of the phone, right under the camera. On the right, you’ll find the volume key and a little ways below that, a “Convenience Key” which, honestly, every phone should have. This little round button, reminiscent of Sony’s camera key, does nothing until you assign a shortcut to it. There’s a wide choice of actions such as turning on a flashlight to looking at your agenda to heading straight to the dialpad to turning on WiFi.

When you wake the phone up, you’ll find no sign of BlackBerry at first. If it hadn’t been for prompts in the setup process, you wouldn’t immediately know what’s different as everything looks regular Android. The display is a nice crisp, clean AMOLED 1440 x 2560 pixels (~534 ppi pixel density) and looks just wonderful. But look closely and you’ll see that there’s a little white tab along the right edge. This pulls out with a swipe and you’ll find tucked away here the BlackBerry Hub, your agenda, tasks and contacts. After all these years, no one handles email quite like BlackBerry and that ease and convenience is now on an Android phone. Incidentally, you can download the BlackBerry Hub on any Android phone but there’s a paid subscription to using it, unlike on the DTEKs. The BBM messenger is also at hand, in case you still know people who use it.

But perhaps the biggest proposition that BlackBerry has to offer on Android is security. Should you find your security level dropping, a notification appears in the dropdown to tell you.

You can also always have a look at a DTEK app and manage various security parameters from here. The best part of this feature is how you can look at the access each of your apps has to your data.

You can grant permissions or revoke access from this zone even when the app is in use. The transparency should appeal to business users who care about being as secure as possible. Storage on this phone is encrypted. Security patches are to be channeled to this device as quickly as they are to Google’s own phones. I might point out however, that the DTEK phones are made for BlackBerry by the Chinese TCL. The primary camera on the DTEK60 is a 21MP shooter while the front camera is an 8MP one. Results from these are pretty decent with the usual struggles in low light.

There is a manual mode and the usual panorama, HDR, slo-mo etc are supported.

The DTEK60 is a single SIM device and has a microSD card slot to add to the 32GB on board. It runs on the Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM, performing smoothly. The 3,000mAh battery which performs acceptably.

The BlackBerry DTEK60 is a good phone, better than its sibling, the DTEK50 because of better specs. But if you don’t worry about security or know how to use third party apps to protect your data, you may not be tempted to put down the hefty asking price for this phone.

Price: ₹46,990

Love: Security features, integration of BlackBerry Hub

Hate: Price

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