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Johannesburg - Refusing to die or ditch buttons, BlackBerry have announced that they will be launching their new smartphone the Mercury.
The smartphone-maker said that they will be releasing a new device with a full physical keyboard during Mobile World Congress 2017, to be held in Barcelona next month.
The news of the Mercury launch remained relatively lowkey, with BlackBerry tweeting a short clip teasing the new device which features a full physical QWERTY keyboard.
BlackBerry will join the ranks of LG and Huawei in launching the Mercury also known as the ‘DTEK70’, in on February 26.
READ: OBITUARY: Rest in Peace BlackBerry
The date which is unofficially part of the conference traditionally sees launches from major manufacturers.
Two top manufacturers have already marked the Sunday prior to the Mobile World Congress 2017 for product launches.
Last year, the LG G5, Huawei MateBook and Samsung S7 and S7 Plus were all launched on the date prior to commencement of the previous event.
The Mercury is expected to have a 4.5 inch full-touchscreen display, with a 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution with the keyboard at the bottom.
It is expected to be run by a Snapdragon 821 chipset with the Android Marshmallow operating system.
It is also expected to feature a 13 megapixel primary camera and an 8 megapixel facing camera.
In September last year, BlackBerry announced that they would stop producing smartphones, but later announced a new line of smartphones would be produced by other companies with the BlackBerry branding, while they focused to secure software.
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