BlackBerry is expected to unleash its newest flagship smartphone, powered with Android Marshmallow OS at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 event. It will be the second BlackBerry smartphone that will run on Android OS.
The BlackBerry Priv that was released last year is a unique smartphone as it comes with a slider keyboard. The mysterious BlackBerry smartphone is said to be codenamed as Vienna, GSM Arena reported. It is expected to be a midrange smartphone that will carry an affordable price tag.
In December 2015, the CEO of BlackBerry, John Chen had hinted that the Canadian firm would be releasing its second smartphone with Android OS onboard in this year. At that time, he refrained from revealing anything about the smartphone.
The leaked images of the BlackBerry Vienna smartphone were spotted in November last year. It revealed that the smartphone will be featuring a physical keyboard instead of the slider keyboard of the BlackBerry Priv. The inclusion of a physical keyboard indicates that it will be a low-priced smartphone.
The leaked photos showed the rear camera with LED flash along with physical volume buttons on its right side. The power button is placed on the left side, NDTV reported. Newer reports suggest the Vienna smartphone would arrive with a 5-inch display that supports 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution along with 3 GB of RAM. The rear camera of the BlackBerry Vienna is speculated to be of 18 MP.
The success of BlackBerry Priv smartphone is still not known yet. At the beginning, the smartphone was exclusively through AT&T in the U.S. However, T-Mobile also start selling the BlackBerry Priv from last month. In March, Verizon is also expected to support the smartphone. Sprint is also likely to sell the BlackBerry Priv in the near future.
The BlackBerry Priv was launched last year in October with impressive specs. It features a 5.4-inch Quad HD display protected with Gorilla Glass 4. It is powered by Snapdragon 808 chipset and 3 GB of RAM.
The native storage of the Priv smartphone is of 32 GB. It supports up to 200 GB of microSD on its additional storage slot. The rear camera of BlackBerry Priv is of 18 MP and it comes with features like dual-LED flash and OIS. The frontal camera is of 2 MP. It comes with a huge battery of 3410 mAh capacity.