TCL Communication’s newest BlackBerry smartphone, the all-touch BlackBerry Motion is now available in South Africa with Cellucity.

It is the first BlackBerry smartphone to offer IP67 water and dust resistance, a new anti-scratch display technology, and the largest battery ever in a BlackBerry offering up to two days of battery life.

“The launch of BlackBerry Motion allows us to further diversify our product offering, delivering new experiences while remaining steadfast with the privacy, reliability and productivity that have made BlackBerry so iconic over the years,” says Alain Lejeune, global GM for BlackBerry Mobile. “This is an exciting addition to our growing BlackBerry smartphone portfolio, setting a strong foundation for further portfolio and market growth in the year to come.”

The new phone has a 5,5-inch Full-HD Premium Anti-Scratch Display, as well as a hardened aluminum frame and soft-grip textured back.

BlackBerry Motion also comes with the largest battery ever in a BlackBerry smartphone (4 000mAh), offering 32-plus hours of mixed use. Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 enables up to a 50% charge in about 40 minutes using a USB Type-C charger.

Powered by Android 7.1 Nougat, the smartphone gives customers access to the entire Google PlayTM store and will receive monthly Andoid security updates for a minimum of two years. It will be upgraded to Android Oreo later this year.

Like the BlackBerry KEYone, the BlackBerry Motion is designed with security built-in. This includes a hardened operating system and BlackBerry Limited’s proprietary technique for establishing a hardware root of trust and adding security keys to the processor.

The BlackBerry Motion also comes with all the signature BlackBerry experiences that bring an unmatched level of efficiency to everything a customer does on the phone like BlackBerry Hub, BlackBerry Calendar, DTEK by BlackBerry and BlackBerry Boost charging.

New to this latest BlackBerry Smartphone is a personal Locker, where customers can store documents and photos to an internal storage area that requires the device owner’s PIN code or fingerprint to access. Locker Mode allows customers to capture images and directly save those photos to the internal storage area, so they are not automatically saved to a cloud.

There’s also an improved customisable Convenience Key that includes four customisable profiles for Home, Car, Office and User, allowing for three different shortcut options that can be triggered by a home WiFi network, in-car Bluetooth, meetings that are synced to BlackBerry Hub or apps that are most commonly used. There is also a fingerprint sensor on the front of the device, which a doubles as a physical home button for added ease of use.