Last week, we reported that BlackBerry sold its branding rights to TCL. The Chinese manufacturer, which has already released two BlackBerry branded smartphones this year — the DTEK50 and DTEK60 — will be the company’s only hardware partner in the future.

In a recent press release, TCL announced that it plans to “unveil an evolutionary first in the mobile industry” which will include its new BlackBerry phones. That phrasing makes it sound not so much like the evolutionary first will be on the new phones, but will be something announced alongside them. The devices will be revealed during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which kicks off on January 5 in Las Vegas.

Currently, no concrete details regarding the upcoming smartphones are known. But it is possible that one of the handsets will be the rumored Mercury, which just might feature a QWERTY keyboard.

TCL’s North American president recently tweeted a cryptic message about “the new BlackBerry” that referenced the first typewriter to feature a Shift key, an addition that massively influenced the popularity of the then-nascent technology.

TCL has said that it will announce more details regarding its plans for the new BlackBerry smartphones at CES and how the brand’s legacy will live on.

So I guess we’ll just have to wait for a little while longer in order to see what TCL has in store for us. Let’s just hope that the company does showcase a few great BlackBerry devices that will do justice to the iconic Canadian brand. Fingers crossed.