BlackBerry Launches its Last Phone: BlackBerry DTEK60 is a Powerful Android Device

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn’t believe they applied to him.

– Nate Silver

It was a long time coming. The writing was on the wall. The mighty have fallen. Officially!

But not without a fight.

BlackBerry has launched its last smartphone. Yes, the company that was once synonymous with the word ‘smartphone’ will no longer make smartphones of its own. The new BlackBerry DTEK60 is the last hardware product that BlackBerry will be responsible for.

After years of losing ground to the iPhone and Android market, late last year BlackBerry decided to finally board the Android train, but it was too little too late. The DTEK60 is BlackBerry’s third Android phone and the company has decided, rather prudently, that it’s time to shut its hardware shop. The fact that BlackBerry will be around as a software brand is a hard pill to swallow for most BlackBerry loyalists and tech history nerds alike. But history has a way of revealing itself that none of us can anticipate.

Before we get into more details about BlackBerry’s future, let’s take a brief look at the DTEK60.

Specifications – BlackBerry DTEK60

The BlackBerry DTEK60 comes with a 5.5 inch display. This display has a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels. The phone will have a 1.6 GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with an Adreno 530 GPU. The phone will also boast of a 4 GB RAM and internal storage of 32 GB which can be expanded if the customer is willing to spend a few extra bucks on a microSD card.

More from iSpyPrice: Check out the new BlackBerry DTEK60 mobile

The DTEK60 offers a 21 megapixel primary camera with f/2.0 aperture, 4K video recording, Phase Detection Autofocus, and dual-tone LED flash. The secondary camera comes with an 8 megapixel unit with an 84 degree wide angle lens for those mandatory selfies at your family reunions.

This is a single SIM 4G (LTE) phone with dimensions – 153.9 x 75.4 x 7 mm. The phone weighs a decent 165 grams. The battery capacity on the DTEK60 is 3000 mAh and the battery supports Quick Charge 3.0. There is also a fingerprint sensor to boot.

The phone will be powered by Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

How long till BlackBerry shuts shops once and for all?

If there is one thing BlackBerry deserves credit for it has to be the fact that the company stuck to its core values even when the chips were down, which was pretty much all the time over the last few years. BlackBerry made its best efforts to improve its BlackBerry OS. The BlackBerry 10 is in fact a terrific product. Unfortunately, there were not too many developers willing to build stuff that ran on top of BB10.

When the BB10 experiment failed BlackBerry finally switched to Android and each of the three Android phones launched by BlackBerry easily qualify as quality products in their own right. From the BlackBerry Priv to the BlackBerry DTEK50 and now the DTEK60 there were no compromises from the Waterloo based company. But once again it is not the quality of output that has let BlackBerry down, it is the lack of foresight in BlackBerry’s senior leadership that has let them down time and again.

One can be pretty certain that this decision by BlackBerry to end its hardware line is, judging by current circumstances, the right decision. The DTEK60 is indeed the last device whose success will be the company’s responsibility, but it may prove to be a step in the right direction. BlackBerry will now focus on its more profitable businesses. These include building software and managing mobile devices.

This transition will not be easy and BlackBerry needs to ensure that another of its core specialities – building secure software for mobile devices – keeps up with the times and does not lag as its competitors improve their products. If BlackBerry does not complete a successful transition from a hardware + software brand to a pure software brand soon we might see them shut shop for good by this time next year.