PhoneArena Awards 2015: Best Tablet 3
BlackBerry Key2 LE – Performance If the BlackBerry Key2’s Snapdragon 660 was an upper-mid-range chip in a lower-top-end device, then the BlackBerry Key2 LE’s Snapdragon 636 feels about right. It’s a comfortably mid-range chip in a comfortably mid-range phone. I have no complaints about the Key2 LE’s performance. It handled all the tasks you’d associate with a hardened BlackBerry user – swapping between multiple apps, jumping into the home screen and firing off a quick message from the BlackBerry Hub – very snappily indeed; aided no doubt by to provision of 4GB of RAM. This general smoothness is reflected in the phone’s Geekbench 4 benchmark results. An average multi-core score of 4,889 is pretty strong, while a single core score of 1,337 reflects a device that does the simple stuff snappily.
That’s not too far removed from the scores I got with the Xiaomi Mi A2, which runs on the same Snapdragon 660 CPU that powers the Key2. The Moto G6 Plus, meanwhile, only scored 4,081 with its older Snapdragon 630 chip. Gaming performance was also pretty good. Guns of Boom ran stutter-free, while I was able to bump Asphalt 9 up to high settings with only the occasional frame rate stutter.
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Of course, neither game is at its best on the BlackBerry Key2 LE’s pokey screen. Reaching your thumb across the keyboard to access the screen proves seriously awkward. Related: Best smartphones Interestingly, Asphalt 9 went so far as to detect the keyboard, and it actually activates manual controls by default. Which sounds great, until you realise that the steering controls have been mapped according to the keyboard’s regular portrait alignment, not when it’s tipped over 90 degrees.
When it comes to storing such apps and media, you get a choice of 32GB or 64GB of internal space and there’s a microSD slot for expansion purposes. We’ve seen cheaper phones packing 64GB as standard but it’s an adequate provision. BlackBerry Key2 LE – Software BlackBerry and owner TCL is well into its Android phase at this stage, which means that the BlackBerry Key2 LE runs on Google’s popular mobile OS rather than BlackBerry’s own. Die-hard BlackBerry fans might beg to disagree but we feel that this is a good thing in terms of user experience. It’s certainly a massive improvement when it comes to app selection and quality. BlackBerry Hub on the Key2 LE Besides, you still get custom BlackBerry flourishes in here. BlackBerry Hub, for example, continues to assemble all of your incoming messages into one linear list.
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Yes, it can get rather busy, and yes, tapping on individual messages takes you to the individual apps anyway. But there’s still something faintly magical about seeing all of your emails, text messages, WhatsApp threads and Slack exchanges existing together in the same space. Pulling down in the app to see your next few calendar entries is another genuinely useful touch. The BlackBerry flavour continues with the provision of the DTEK security app, which monitors the system for weaknesses and makes suggestions where appropriate. Those aforementioned keyboard shortcuts are another case of the old BlackBerry way of doing things being grafted onto Android, and the transplant is largely a successful one. Related: Best Android Phones Outside of these areas, this is a commendably clean take on Android. The home screen layout, menus and icons are all largely as you’d find on a stock Android device.
The multitasking menu is a lot more delineated and the app tray contains widgets and shortcuts but that’s about it for core tinkering. It feels a bit like an older version of Android and we’d suggest that it might be time for a stylistic refresh in-keeping with Google’s own recent efforts. But the BlackBerry Key2 LE’s software also feels reassuringly BlackBerryish in its no-nonsense approach.
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