The new DTEK50 is better than recent BlackBerry phones in one important way - it’s an unlocked LTE smartphone that costs just arount 21000 in india.
For the comparatively small amount of money, the DTEK50 isn’t bad for blackbeery lovers. It’s surprisingly thin ( at 7.4mm) and light ( 135 grams) . While it’s partially made of plastic, a black aluminum band with shiny silver beveled edges catch the light quite nicely and make it hard to drop. It’s easy to use with a single hand, unlike many modern smartphones.
The 5.2-inch, 1920x1080-pixel IPS screen is perfectly competent, even if it’s not a stunning AMOLED display, while a pair of stereo speakers ( they face front and back) make it a pretty decent phone.
There’s also a dedicated programmable button on the side of the phone to launch any app you want. While you can’t use it when the phone is locked, it’s decent as a quick flashlight or camera toggle.
Even the battery life is OK for a phone this small. It ran roughly 11 hours in my standard video streaming drain test. In my personal use, I usually make it home after a full day’s work before the battery dies.
For 21000, the DTEK50 feels a bit slower than I’d hoped. It always feels like there’s a slight delay before the phone opens the app, summons the keyboard or loads the link I want. Our benchmarks bear that out, too. Raw performance numbers show the DTEK50 performing at about the same level as the Moto G4, a phone that costs 15000.
And it’s a shame that BlackBerry’s camera is so weak in low-light settings: I get super noisy, smudgy photos most places that aren’t outdoors. I also found it much slower to focus or shoot HDR images than today’s high-end phones.
Software
Nate said it in our review of BlackBerry’s first Android phone, and I’ll say it again: BlackBerry has actually made some useful tweaks to the Android operating system.
It’s pretty neat to be able to slide out the Productivity Tab from the edge of the screen and instantly see my upcoming calendar events, and the BlackBerry Hub is a nice way to triage multiple email accounts, Slack messages and social media updates all in the same place.
But I wouldn’t buy a phone for those things. And in some cases, I don’t have to. The BlackBerry Hub is free to download on other Android phones ( though you’ll have to pay $1 a month or view ads after 30 days) . So is BBM, the venerable messaging app that’s been a feature of BlackBerry phones for over a decade.
Security
BlackBerry’s pitch isn’t just software, though. The company is proudly advertising the DTEK50 as The World’s Most Secure Android Smartphone.
But the features that make the DTEK50 so secure all seem to either be placebos or functions already found on stock Android devices.
For instance, the DTEK50’s storage is fully encrypted right out of the box. As good as that sounds, so is every other smartphone running Android 6.0 or above.
Heck, the DTEK50 is named after an app, DTEK, that tells you when other apps access your camera, microphone, location, and other sensitive permissions. But Android 6.0 already forces apps to ask for those same exact permissions.
And while it’s nice that BlackBerry protects your phone’s boot-up process from being tampered with, it’s a feature already available in Android as well - one that will be required by default in phones running Android Nougat, the next version of the operating system.