It's confirmed that the once-popular BlackBerry is pulling out of making its own hardware, but the tech firm wants to give one last shot at impressing its fans around the world. In a fresh round of reports, photos of a smartphone codenamed BlackBerry Mercury have surfaced online to show what the company's last in-house phone looks like.
Series of images were leaked on China's social networking site Weibo, showing a relatively-new BlackBerry handset in action. The company has decided to put the iconic QWERTY keyboard just below the display of the phone. There are capacitive navigation buttons between the touch screen display and the fixed keyboard.
At first glance, the rumoured Mercury smartphone looks a lot like BlackBerry Priv, except the slider. The handset is based on Android, most likely Nougat, and features the power button and the volume controls on the right side.
If this is the final design of BlackBerry's last in-house smartphone, then fans are in for some disappointment. The fixed keyboard might come in handy, but the design at large is kept unchanged. Frankly, BlackBerry will have a lot of convincing to do in order to pull in some decent sales out of this phone, unless you have a soft spot for BlackBerry's physical keyboard.
As far as the rumours go, the alleged BlackBerry Mercury sports a fingerprint scanner integrated within the space bar, a Snapdragon 625 chipset, a 4.5-inch touch display, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, 18MP primary camera and an 8MP front snapper.
The company's most recent releases, DTEK50 and DTEK60 were merely rebranded versions of Alcatel Idol 4 and 4S phones. The company announced that it is officially shutting down producing, stocking and distributing its own phones due to losses. But CEO John Chen had confirmed that a smartphone with a physical keyboard was underway and it looks like it is the Mercury.
Will BlackBerry maintain its legacy with its last device or get pushed back by the strong rivals such as Apple and Samsung? Only time will tell.
