Although today Blackberry is not remembered by the new generations, but by those who used phones of this brand, until not too many years Blackberry was one of the giants in the field of mobile telephony. If you went around any executive environment a decade ago, most used Blackberrys.
Since then and certainly desperate, Blackberry has tried to reconquer that market they lost, in which design standards had rejected the physical keyboard long ago and replaced by the digital version of QWERTY completely assimilated today. Blackberry tried a couple of years ago installing the Android operating system in their terminals (they had always operated under their own), but nothing. The smartphones presented in 2016 passed without penalty or glory, although at the Mobile World Congress 2017 we saw what could be the last bet: Blackberry KeyOne.
The KeyOne has not proved to be the tremendous success that was expected, but has still managed to sell some 850,000 units since its premiere last year, the Chinese Telecommunications regulatory body that records all the new phones that will be released: BlackBerry Athena, the next terminal of the brand that retrieves the physical keyboard and continues to discard the current standards.
Breaking With the Current Trend
BlackBerry Athena presents a design very similar to that of the KeyOne, although elements such as the power button or the rubber rear cover -which extends over the entire surface-, seem somewhat different. The screen itself is seen as another 4.5-inch display with 3: 2 ratio as the KeyOne and the keyboard seems redesigned while maintaining the QWERTY novelty that we saw in the KeyOne model: a physical keyboard that is handled as a virtual one with a series of physical and real buttons that make up the classic QWERTY that behave under the principles of a virtual keyboard.
There is no doubt that for many experts, BlackBerry should do as Nokia and embrace the current design of mobile all screen under Android operating system, but if this Athena manages to be more successful than KeyOne, it will make clear that there is still room for this terminal that seems so retro next to the current ones.