BlackBerry Ltd In 2015: Four New Phones Are Coming, Including A Curved Design With Slide-Out Keyboard

BlackBerry is planning four new smartphones, including one that will have a curved touch screen and a slide-out keyboard, shown at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. BlackBerry didn’t give many details on most of its upcoming phones, which will also include another phone in the Porsche Design line as well as one with a standard keyboard. But the company did unveil a new mid-range smartphone called the BlackBerry Leap.

The Leap is a return to a touchscreen design, after Blackberry released two devices - the BlackBerry Passport and the BlackBerry Classic - with a more traditional slate style with a built in QWERTY keyboard.

The BlackBerry Leap has specifications which are pretty standard at this point; a 5-inch Full HD (1280 x 720) display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, 2GB of RAM memory and 16GB of internal storage, an 8-megapixel camera and a 2,800 mAh battery. It’s hardware is similar to devices that released at least two-years ago, the Verge noted.

BlackBerry shipped 7.9 million devices last year, according to research firm Gartner, compared to nearly 308 million phones shipped by Samsung and 191 million shipped by Apple in 2014.