Back during IFA this year, BlackBerry showed us a
new variant of the BlackBerry KEY2 with an "LE" badge at the end of
the name. It has a slightly lower price tag and some really interesting color
options. The one that stood out the most was the Atomic color, which is a very
nice color combination of dark navy blue keys with red frets and a red frame.
The US$ 499 BlackBerry KEY2 LE is now available in
Champagne from Amazon in the United States and the Atomic color will be
exclusively available from Best Buy along with the Champagne options as well.
This joins the plain ol’ Slate color option that BlackBerry launched in the US
back in October.
For those interested, Best Buy has the Slate color
on sale for US$ 399 while the other two color options are US$ 499. The normal price
of the Slate version of US$ 449, which means that the company is charging a US$ 50
premium for the better two color combinations.
The BlackBerry KEY2 LE is a cheaper version of the
BlackBerry KEY2. It offers the same full QWERTY keyboard experience while
reducing the production costs by changing a few things like bringing back the
frets between keys from the KEY One and using more dense plastic in the body.
There’s a 13MP + 5MP dual camera setup here instead of the 12MP + 12MP on the
KEY2. Finally, the CPU sees a downgrade with a Snapdragon 636 instead of the
660 found in the KEY2.
