If you have always admired the design of BlackBerry smartphones, but favoured Android OS over BlackBerry OS, there's some good news for you. The Canadian smartphone-maker is reportedly planning to jump into the Android bandwagon by launching a new high-end slider smartphone later this year.
If the rumours are true, the unannounced handset, codenamed Venice, will come with a physical keyboard, run Android OS and arrive ahead of the big holidays in November.
BlackBerry Venice was showed off at this year's MWC event and it is widely believed to be powered by Android. In fact, rumours suggest BlackBerry will launch two models of Venice, one powered with Android while the other variant will run on BB10 OS, Phone Arena reported. What's more interesting is the list of leaked specifications that make quite an impact on the high-end smartphone market.
According to a report by N4BB, the Venice slider smartphone will feature a 5.4-inch Quad-HD display and run on 1.8GHz 64-bit Hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor paired with 3GB RAM. While the processor may not be high-end compared to OnePlus 2, which is coming with a Snapdragon 810 V2.1, these are just rumours and may get tweaked in the coming months. Going back to the MWC event, CEO John Chen teased the slider device at the event. According to Digital Trends, the Venice is expected to feature a dual-curved display similar to Galaxy S6 Edge.
On the camera side, the Venice is expected to feature an 18mp primary shooter with flash and a 5mp front snapper. The pricing on the new Venice smartphone remains unconfirmed, but the new combination of high-end specs and Android OS will certainly help BlackBerry regain some fan-following, just like good old days.
