BlackBerry KEYone North American pricing and availability will be revealed next week

TCL has gotten a lot of praise for the company’s newest BlackBerry device, and the device isn't out yet. Originally codenamed the BlackBerry Mercury (which we took a sneak peak of at CES), the BlackBerry KEYone was officially announced at MWC this February. Yet, the phone is still not available for sale in North America.

Today, Steve Cistulli, President and General Manager over at TCL Communications tweeted a photo of the KEYone resting atop its retail packaging. He mentions there will be some “KEY news coming” next week.

Some more KEY news coming your way next week... Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/TXWuzmxxZF

— Steve Cistulli (@SteveCistulli) April 21, 2017

Steve had previously tweeted that the phone would become available on May 5 in North America and major European markets (global launch to come later) and that the delay was to ensure that there would not be supply VS demand issues. Still, what we don’t know about the phone (and are expecting to hear about next week) is: pricing for unlocked and carrier variants (if available), colors available for launch, and where the KEYone can be purchased in the US and Canada.

The BlackBerry KEYone will take BlackBerry’s focused efforts on software and combine it with hardware made by TCL – its first smartphone licensed by BlackBerry. It will feature a physical QWERTY keyboard with touch-sensitive gestures. There’s a 4.5-inch touch display and the device runs Android skinned with BlackBerry’s suite of Enterprise and productivity services.

Under the hood, powering the software is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset, 3GB of RAM, and powering the hardware is a 3,505 mAh battery. Check out our hands-on post if you haven’t done so already.