BlackBerry was long rumoured to be working on the successor to the successful BlackBerry KEYone. In February this year, alleged images of the BlackBerry Athena which is said to be the successor of KEYone was first spotted on Geekbench, and a few weeks later, alleged press renders of the upcoming phone surfaced online. Now the device has finally made to China’s telecommunications regulator TENAA. The TENAA certification includes four images of the Blackberry Athena, which is seen in a Black colour variant. For the most part, the new images from Chinese regulator lineup with the earlier renders albeit few subtle refinements to the keyboard.
The Athena comes with a redesigned keyboard and a larger display above. All the physical buttons - volume rocker, power button have been moved to the right side while SIM card and microSD slots have been moved to left side. There’s now USB-C port on the bottom while the device retains 3.5mm headphone jack on top. On the rear are dual camera sensors arranged horizontally and positioned at the top left corner. Beside the sensors, there is a LED flash and device comes with a matte black finish with BlackBerry logo.
The Blackberry Athena is made by Huizhou TCL Mobile Communications Co. Ltd and comes with a model number: BBF100-4 as per the TENAA. The device is expected to launch as a successor to the BlackBerry KEYone as we stated and may arrive as the BlackBerry KEYtwo or BlackBerry KEYone (2018).
Unfortunately, the TENAA listing does not contain any hardware information or specifications beyond this, so far. However, rumours have it that Athena will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoC or Snapdragon 660 SoC paired with 6GB of RAM. It will come with 64GB onboard storage and support expansion up to 2TB with a microSD card.
The device will sport a 4.5-inch (1620 x 1080 pixels) display with 3:2 aspect ratio and a 4-row QWERTY physical backlit keyboard. There’s the fingerprint sensor built into the spacebar, same as last year’s KEYone. On the rear there will be a 12MP primary camera with a secondary rear camera and dual-tone LED flash. The front will have an 8MP selfie shooter.
Connectivity options will include 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac (2.4 & 5 GHz), Bluetooth 4.2, GPS / GLONASS, NFC, USB 3.1 Type-C. Fuelled by 3360mAh battery with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0, the device will run Android 8.1 Oreo.
