I am a gadget addict.

Over the last ten years I’ve averaged 3 phones and 1.5 tablets per year. Let’s not even talk about camera gear, audio equipment, and IoT devices; my annual tech budget would cause most people to receive threats of divorce. I’ve never owned something for more than a few minutes without spotting ways I’d like it to be improved. I am addicted to upgrades.

So when I tell you that, for me, the Blackberry Keyone is the perfect device and that I’ll use it until it dies, understand that I’m making an absurd promise.

And yet...

The biggest hurts I’ve had in the last few years, when it comes to my phones, are battery life and productivity.

The iPhone has never stood a chance at ticking those two boxes and while I’ve used some interesting Android and WP handsets (my favorites of all time being the LG G4 and Samsung Ativ S) nothing has ever given me that feeling of forgetting anything else even existed on the market like the BlackBerry Bold once did.

Until now that is.

The Keyone is a wonderful device. It feels great in the hand, has some voodoo under the hood that ensures that I won’t ever kill the phone in under a full day, and gets rid of the app gap that doomed Blackberry’s efforts on its own beautiful but flawed OS10 by embracing Android 7.1 Nougat.

It also shrinks the display from the 5"+ panels we’ve grown accustomed to a stocky 4.5" LCD, which is going to be an issue for avid gamers and folks who like to binge watch Netflix on the go. To be sure, you can still do those things on the Keyone; the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 powering the device is plenty capable in its own right and handily outperforms the Keyone’s older sibling, the PRIV. You just won’t enjoy the experience as much as you would on a Samsung Galaxy S8 or iPhone 7.

But for everyone whose phone priorities revolve more around getting things done than being passively entertained, there’s simply no better device on the market right now.

I had previously owned the PRIV and the last few days has made me ponder why the Keyone is so much more satisfying to use than that poorly received elder statesman of the BlackBerry line.

The Priv was capitulation

What I think it comes down to is intent. The PRIV was capitulation. It was BlackBerry throwing their hands in the air and saying “fine, we get it, you like big screens and apps. Have this Android device with a gimmicky hardware trick.” That phone wasn’t for anyone. Android loyalists didn’t want it because the keyboard made the device cumbersome to type on (I bonked myself in the head with the screen extended more than once trying to send a text while lying in bed), and BlackBerry diehards didn’t want it because it didn’t do BlackBerry things nearly as well as on BB’s native platform. The port of the productivity suite to Android in particular felt clunky and unrefined.

The PRIV was a phone made by a company frustrated that the market had moved past them and not knowing, or caring, how to win it back.

The Keyone, by contrast, is unabashedly a BlackBerry. It feels like a stretched out version of my old Bold 9900. The keyboard is near perfect, all clicky and backlit, the BlackBerry productivity suite now works properly, (including pinch to see unread notifications!) and the device feels like you would injure someone if you dropped it on their foot. This is an on-purpose device; no apologies made, no quarter given. It’s a phone for people that use their phones for work first, and everything else second, while refraining from trying to limit your ability to do “everything else” like every other ‘Berry has since the iPhone first upended the smartphone market ten years ago.

The Keyone is a true return to form for BlackBerry and a wholly modern device that should appeal to anyone old enough to have to spend more time in an inbox than in Game Centre.

I’m in love, and not ashamed to admit it. BlackBerry is back.