Early this year, the smartphone industry got a surprise from BlackBerry when it announced at the CES in Las Vegas that is it working on an Android phone tentatively called the Mercury. This handset will prominently feature the company's trademark physical keyboard. This week, the BlackBerry Mercury had its reveal in an episode of ABC sitcom "Last Man Standing".

In that episode of the television comedy series, actor Tim Allen was using a BlackBerry Mercury for a couple of minutes. Allen's character, Michael Baxster, was showing the smartphone off in some of his scenes.

This is an obvious product placement from the Canadian company which is now building the hype over its upcoming flagship smartphone. Product placements are often used by big companies to promote their product, to increase brand awareness, and to reach a wider audience. The TV series' several sequences gave a good view of the device's façade which has a relatively large touch screen display.

Tim Allen is said to be a BlackBerry purist who is fond of the device's keyboard. He has appeared in the sitcom's previous episodes where he was seen sporting the BlackBerry Passport and BlackBerry Priv. The ABC series also featured the BlackBerry DTEK60.

There is still a dearth of information about the BlackBerry Mercury's features and specs. The only certain features are its 4.5-inch display, which has a 4:3 aspect ratio and a front mounted touch-sensitive QWERTY keyboard which also acts as a trackpad.

The device's speculated specs include a 3.5mm headphone port, a USB Type-C port, and a 3,400mAh battery. A mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset and a 3GB RAM are said to power the phone.

More speculations surmise that the BlackBerry Mercury will have an 18MP front shooter which is used on the BlackBerry Priv. Others claim that the unit will sport the 12MP camera seen on the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL. These speculations will be confirmed once the smartphone is revealed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

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