BlackBerry's Last QWERTY Android Smartphone Leaked In New Photos

BlackBerry has come out with three Android-powered smartphones now, with the first one released over a year ago. In a most recent leak, it looks like the company will be releasing another one, and it just might be the last one to come with a physical QWERTY keyboard.

Over the weekend, two photos of the new BlackBerry smartphone, codenamed Mercury, were leaked on the Chinese social network Weibo. The new in-the-wild photo of the device matches that of the one shown by the company back in June, but this time the handset comes with a top bezel housing the front-facing camera, sensors and the earpiece.

The handset does look more like a "classic" BlackBerry phone, rather than another typical Android smartphone. But unlike the Priv, the Mercury’s keyboard doesn’t slid out and sits right in front of the device just like any of BlackBerry’s older handsets, as pointed out by 9To5Google. This also breaks away from BlackBerry’s all-touchscreen designs from the DTEK50 and DTEK60, which were just repurposed handsets from Alcatel.

Another notable difference from the Priv is that the Mercury comes with capacitive navigation button on top of the QWERTY keyboard instead of software buttons. This is perhaps a way to provide more screen real estate to what appears to be an already small screen.

Based on previous leaks, the BlackBerry Mercury comes with a 4.5-inch display with an aspect ratio of 3:2. Under the hood, the device is packing a 2.0 GHz octa-core processor believed to be from Qualcomm, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Up front is an 8-megapixel camera, and on the back is an 18-megapixel shooter. In terms of software, the device appears to be running a version of Android 7.0 Nougat, according to The Next Web.

Rumors of another QWERTY keyboard-equipped BlackBerry Android smartphone first popped up in June. BlackBerry CEO John Chen confirmed the existence of the handset a little later. As of writing, the company hasn’t announced an official release date for the BlackBerry Mercury just yet.