According to a recent listing on Geekbench, a new BlackBerry Android smartphone code-named ‘Rome’ is in the works. Initial reports suggest the device is said to feature the QWERTY keyboard along with a hexacore processor.
BlackBerry Android Smartphone Rome Specs
In addition, it is expected to get 3GB of RAM and Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out-of-the-box. The rumoured BlackBerry Rome is said to feature a Snapdragon 650 with a quad-core ARM Cortex A53s clocked at a speed of 1.4 GHz, along with a dual-core cluster Cortex-A72 running at a clock speed of 1.8 GHz.
BlackBerry Android Smartphone Neon Specs
Apart from Rome, another BlackBerry device codenamed Neon was also spotted, which might release soon. The Neon is speculated to feature a Snapdragon octa-core 600 series with ARM Cortex-A53 cores. No other information or details about these handsets are available at this moment.
BlackBerry has been struggling to establish its niche in the smartphone market. The fallen manufacturer was once at the helm of the mainstream phone market, has been finding it rather hard to reclaim its lost glory. The company, in the past, tried to revive itself with the introduction of new QWERTY based handsets namely Passport and Classic, though they weren’t much of a success.
While last year, BlackBerry released its first official Android-powered smartphone integrated with BlackBerry’s proprietary suite of apps – the BlackBerry Priv.
BlackBerry Priv featured a Snapdragon 808 (Dual-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A57 & Quad-core 1.44 GHz Cortex-A53) and Adreno 418 GPU. Other key specifications included a 5.4-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a pixel density 540 ppi. The Priv’s screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection and rocks a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution.
BlackBerry Priv comes with 3GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The onboard memory is further expandable up to 256 GB via a microSD card slot. Optics on the smartphone include an 18 MP primary camera along with a 2MP front-facing camera.
Unfortunately, not even Priv could pull BlackBerry out of its tailspin; hence, a lot depends on the success of these upcoming smartphones. The initial price tag was too much, given that it was clearly out there to compete with the likes of the flagships from Apple, Samsung, and HTC, it was a bit of gamble.
The company CEO did acknowledge to the fact that the market for high-end phones has become saturated and said they’re looking into mid-range devices in the coming future. Given the meager phone sales, the Canadian manufacturer posted a loss of $18 million while revenue fell short of the projected $563 million target.
