With the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) event just less than two weeks away, BlackBerry has now started distributing its invites for the company's planned press conference. The image contained in the invites suggests that the company will finally be unveiling their long-awaited new smartphone offering, codenamed Mercury.

According to a report from Express, the company sent out the invites to different media outlets asking them to save the date for their first look at the new BlackBerry Mercury. The invite reveals that the company will be holding its press conference a day before the actual MWC event, on Saturday, Feb. 25 at exactly 7 p.m. CET (6 p.m. GMT) in Barcelona, Spain.

With the majority of the big-name manufacturers, such as Huawei and Samsung, debuting their new products on Sunday, BlackBerry's early launch will give them a bit of a head start. Aside from the released press invite, BlackBerry has yet to officially release a statement regarding their plans for the event. Although it is fairly obvious that the upcoming BlackBerry Mercury smartphone will be presented front and center.

The BlackBerry Mercury smartphone, built in partnership with TCL, will be the company's new flagship Android smartphone. Unlike other smartphones, however, the BlackBerry Mercury will be featuring a tactile physical keyboard that is reminiscent of BlackBerry's past products.

The newly designed keyboard will be placed below a 4.2-inch touchscreen display encased in an all-metallic body. The keyboard itself will also apparently function as a touchpad that can detect different swipes and touch gestures.

According to UberGizmo, the BlackBerry Mercury will probably not be directly competing with high-end flagship models from other manufacturers, which means that it will have some mid-range specs. Some of the rumored specs for the BlackBerry Mercury includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 CPU paired with 3GB of RAM. The device is also expected to have a 3,200 mAh battery and a USB Type-C port.

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