BlackBerry 'Mercury' pops up on Tim Allen's TV show Last Man Standing

Several weeks before the upcoming BlackBerry “Mercury” phone is supposed to be officially launched, it’s already getting some TV air time. The latest episode of Last Man Standing, the ABC TV sitcom starring Tim Allen, briefly showed the phone in the hands of Allen’s character Mike Baxter. He uses it to call his brother Jimmy near the end of the episode, “The Fixer”.

If you are wondering how the show got its hands on this upcoming Android-based handset, it’s not that big of a mystery. Allen has been a very vocal fan of BlackBerry and its phones for a number of years. We are not sure if this is an official example of a paid product placement, or if Allen just used his celebrity to convince the folks at Waterloo to “lend” him the “Mercury” for fun. We are also not sure how, in the fictional universe of Last Man Standing, Mike Baxter got his hands on the latest BlackBerry before anyone else, unless the episode takes place in the near future.

In any case, the few seconds of screen time on Last Man Standing gave us another look at the QWERTY hardware keyboard that’s included with the “Mercury”, along with a look at the back of the phone with its rear camera. A recent rumor claims that the phone’s camera will use the same Sony IMX378 sensor that is already available on the Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones. It’s also rumored to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset inside. In addition, we know that the phone will be targeting enterprise customers, rather than consumers.

We should learn a lot more about the BlackBerry “Mercury” (including what it will really be called, as “Mercury” is just its code name) in less than a month at the 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. We also suspect it will show up again in Allen’s hands in future episodes of Last Man Standing. How do you feel about the phone getting this kind of “under the radar” marketing campaign? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!