TCL executive sends out 4 second video showing the QWERTY on the BlackBerry Mercury

Steve Cistulli, President and General Manager for TCL Communication, sent out a tweet yesterday that included four seconds of video showing the QWERTY on the upcoming BlackBerry 'Mercury.' BlackBerry and TCL entered into a licensing agreement that calls for TCL to design, manufacture, promote, distribute, sell and support future BlackBerry models. BlackBerry is now focusing on software and services.

Last month, the TCL executive cited an old Remington typewriter that was apparently the first to offer a 'shift' key, in order to promote the Mercury's appearance at CES. We took that to mean that the new phone will have a game changing physical QWERTY keyboard. And now comes today's 4-second video teaser that shows a fabulous looking QWERTY keyboards with frets.

TCL will be holding a media event at CES this week, and that should allow us to hear all about the new phone and the physical QWERTY. The handset is rumored to feature a 4.5-inch display, powered by the Snapdragon 625 chipset which contains an octa-core CPU, and the Adreno 506 GPU. 3GB of RAM is inside along with 32GB of native storage. A 3400mAh battery should provide long battery life, and a fingerprint scanner is included. Android 7.0 is pre-installed. The final name of the phone could be something other than BlackBerry Mercury since that title was reportedly just a code name.

The phone is supposed to be coming to (at the least) Verizon, and the QWERTY on some renders of the handset seem to match perfectly with the keyboard on the video that TCL's Cistulli tweeted on Monday. Speaking of the QWERTY, check it out yourself by clicking on the video at the top of this story.

source: @SteveCistulli via Crackberry