Blackberry announced the scrapping of its Smartphone Manufacturing Unit earlier this year but now the company’s CEO has surprised everyone with his statement of launching another ‘QWERTY’ phone soon. The phone will be the last in-house smartphone produced by Blackberry.
The company promised a keyboard phone before the scrapping of its smartphone business and John Chen said that it’s the company’s responsibility to fulfill the promise and it is also going to be a tribute to all the loyal Blackberry customers.
John Chen didn’t tell the exact launch date, however, he said that the phone will be available soon and it will not take long. Rumor has it, that the phone may be launched in the first half of 2017, keeping in mind the launch of every important Blackberry’s smartphone.
Die-hard Blackberry fans might get disappointed after the launch because if we go according to the leaks in the last four months, the phone will be launched with Android instead of BlackBerry 10 OS.
The phone is believed to run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 with 3GB RAM. The phone could have a 4-inch screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio and will be running Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.
Blackberry is also in talks with other companies for licensing deals to allow them to use ‘Blackberry’ brand name and a Chinese and an Indian company is competing neck to neck over the brand rights. However, this also shows that how time changes everything. ‘Once the pioneer of making smartphones is now lurking over other companies to use its brand name’.
How this ‘last’ BlackBerry Qwerty smartphone will do in the market is not going to be a big concern to BlackBerry as the company is now more focussed towards its software business. However, if the phone sells, then it will definitely bring back the good old days of secretly taping over the phone’s keyboard and listening to your parent’s rant about studies.
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11 November 2016
Rohan Jaitly