 I care about you guys too much to just come out and say the BlackBerry key 2 is bad. Don't buy it Possibly preventing you from buying one and loving it just because of my horrible first impressions So I actually spent the last four weeks with this thing as my daily driver Now the TLDR is still I don't like it, and I don't recommend it So you can I guess you can stop watching now if that's all you wanted to know but I would really appreciate it If you suffer through the rest of this video with me so that I can feel like the effort wasn't for nothing Speaking of appreciation I also appreciate our sponsor Thermaltake. Thermaltake's Vue 71 supports Mini ITX, Micro ATX, ATX and EATX Motherboards with a variety of mounting options for your GPU and radiator check it out today at the link below Not everything about the BlackBerry key 2 is bad not even close actually for example. It's black I like the color black and On paper its features are actually pretty complete for the year 2018 Spec wise only the mid-tier Snapdragon 660 processor stands out as inappropriate given the phone $650 off-contract price for the 6gig 64gig storage version and TCL who licenses BlackBerry software and the BlackBerry name for this hardware has even avoided some of the annoyances of modern devices by including a headphone jack and And allowing user upgradable storage through a micro SD card It's just too bad that they created a whole lot of other annoyances while they were at it Let's start with the keyboard Before going any further. It's probably important to provide some context. I rocked a BlackBerry 8700 for a couple of years back in the late 2000s, and I actually loved that thing. I used to love my BlackBerry I still do the BlackBerry key to and at the time it felt like a Huge typing downgrade when I transitioned to the iPhone 4 in 2010. I bought an iPhone 4 Unfortunately for the BlackBerry brand on-screen keyboards have improved a lot since iOS 4 and Theirs has gotten worse so I came in expecting the key to to Feel like the embrace of an old friend and it ended up being more like making love to a stranger Responding to my touch in ways. I didn't expect or understand and then constantly punishing me for doing things wrong The smile keyboard layout that made the keys on older BlackBerry's feel offset Like a desktop keyboard instead of a grid is gone And so are the gaps between the keys that are ever so important especially if you have bigger fingers to finding your way around without looking and I Get that I'm a bit of a punctuation nerd by the standards of the chat snap generation But no dedicated period key drove me absolutely bonkers Now there are some really neat features you can program shortcut key combos like little mini macros to launch apps You can reprogram the currency key and you can customize the layout of the symbol key menu Which is really nice and this one to actually took me a week to figure out But you can swipe back just over top of the keys to backspace You can swipe up on the corresponding part of the keyboard to accept an autocorrect prediction and you can even Swipe style type on these physical keys if you want The issue here is just that if I wanted to do those things Especially that last one I could do them on a software keyboard And then I could even get back the context sensitive functionality of a software keyboard like a single button press for.com which takes five button presses here and a vast menu of emojis while I'm at it Not to mention all of the other things that I can do with more screen time I can do with more screen real estate I mean the funny thing about this is I actually went straight from the Find X to this thing and going from 87% screen to body ratio to about 55 was a shock now the quality of the display is fine and actually so are the Speakers for that matter except there's no stereo effect but everything from movies that look like they are both pillar and And letterboxed due to the wonky 3x2 aspect ratio to even reading text articles was a bad Experience when it comes to content consumption, and that's not something that can be improved I mean back to reading more and more mobile web content is designed around the full screen experience with many smartphone manufacturers going as far as to remove even software buttons in favor of gestures and Like look at this page that I screen captured here It manages to show only a tiny amount of actual article with the rest taken up by a Highlighted quote and an ad so you end up doing a lot of scrolling something that I found particularly unergonomic about this phone, and that's due to the position of the non reconfigurable hardware nav buttons that sit between the keyboard and the screen I ended up accidentally hitting those from time to time both when using the screen for scrolling and When swiping over top of the keyboard for scrolling? Now Blackberry's argument actually had a call with them about this is that this is a communication device not a content consumption device but surely even the world's most boring executive might want to watch a TED talk or Take a picture of the grandkids or something I mean Yeah for me this it was really frustrating because Normally I try to full switch to a device that I'm reviewing that's how I find some of the annoyances That other people might miss, but I had to pull the iPhone out of my back pocket a lot With this one to take pictures and videos like you'll get usable shots sometimes And it's certainly better than having nothing, but look at these artifacts around my daughter's face in this shot I don't remember the last time I saw anything like that So then with all that in mind that communication experience better be amazing, so let's talk about that then Fantastic battery life that's a phone that I haven't had to charge for two days check easy access to Contacts and calendars just swiping over from the right check that too Configurable convenience key profiles for home work and driving well it beats the ever-living crap out of some of the you know extra side button functionality that I've seen and The BlackBerry hub does in fairness a pretty good job of aggregating all of your communication streams in One place if you're the kind of person who finds yourself easily confused by multiple apps So okay obnoxious default email signature aside There are definitely some baby boomers that I wish I could give this to in particular the BlackBerry hub But it just comes with in my opinion too many compromises I mean a big part of BlackBerry's argument for these licensed phones running their validated software is BlackBerry grade security and Dtech is Actually admittedly very cool It gives you an easy way to do a security checkup on your phone and for me more importantly see Exactly what the crap your apps are doing with those permissions that you granted them both in the foreground and the background with timestamps on everything and From reading through a BlackBerry provided white paper It looks like there actually are still a lot of enterprise grade security and management features here But I'm not aware of Android or iOS equivalence for But this is a consumer focus channel and from a consumer standpoint frankly I would rather see some kind of commitment to future Android updates Versus some of these features. I mean the priv launched in late 2015 and never even got nougat So bottom line is I think the neighbor kid actually put it pretty well when he roll up on his bike And the first thing out of his mouth when he saw my phone was hey, that's weird That looks like an old-school BlackBerry, but with the touchscreen So the conclusion is what it is for every BlackBerry phone review if you really like BlackBerry's Have fun if you don't there's frankly nothing about this one that is likely to change your mind Speaking of changing your mind if you're using some other accounting solution Maybe I can change your mind to get you to have a look at fresh books Fresh books is custom-built for the way you want to work whether you're a small business owner or a freelancer It's a simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster And lets you send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds With fresh books you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster And you can see once your client has opened your invoice for the first time to put an end to the guessing games For an unrestricted 30-day free trial just go to freshbooks.com And enter Linus Tech Tips in the how did you hear about us section So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description Did I say that twice whatever The point is we also have our merch store down there and our community forum which you should totally join By the way for those of you wondering why exactly the Find X still has like a sticker on the back and stuff Okay when I switched from this to the Key 2 I was switching from the engineering sample this to the Key 2 This is my retail one this just arrived today I will be starting my review of this today Thank freaking goodness I'm done with that thing It's like annoying in ways that were hard to find a way to write into a script Like when you can't say what's bad about it but it's just not pleasant it's like a you know like an awkward foot massage