Blackberry’s Last Homemade Smartphone Is Scheduled to Debut at CES

Blackberry is readying itself for the debut of its last in-house built smartphone, dubbed Mercury (or DTEK70), which will take place at the highly anticipated CES 2017 tech trade show in January.

Earlier this year, the Canadian smartphone maker announced that it would cease designing and manufacturing handsets internally after years of flagging sales and would instead license its brand name out to Chinese vendor TCL. The idea is that outsourcing hardware development will free up resources and investment in software development, including security and apps.

Leaked images reveal notable design elements including the beloved QWERTY keyboard, a 4.5-inch Quad HD curved edge display, as well as a fingerprint scanner embedded into the spacebar. That last feature is a nice touch, which will allow users to authenticate passwords for various apps quickly and comfortably.

It will be powered by a 2 GHz octa-core Snapdragon 625 processor and a 3,400 mAh battery, and run on Android 7.0 Nougat. As for the sort of camera power the Blackberry Mercury will be packing, it’s expected to come with an 18 MP rear-facing camera and an 8 MP selfie-cam, though this has yet to be confirmed.

The final Blackberry-designed handset will ship with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage along with a MicroSD slot for expanded storage. The Mercury will be exclusive to Verizon in the US.