Last week, a rumor suggested that BlackBerry would be releasing an Android-powered slider this fall. A phone codenamed the BlackBerry Venice was displayed at MWC with a top-down sliding QWERTY that harkens back to the Blackberry Torch.
Even though Venice has been shown with BlackBerry 10 inside, Murtazin says that this will be the Android-driven model coming from the Canadian company. BB10 is a true multitasking system, like Android
For the most part, emulating Android apps hasn’t been a seamless experience on BB10, so having a full-fledged Android device might return the spotlight on BlackBerry again.
Yesterday, a picture by a BlackBerry developer leaked out, allegedly showing a BlackBerry Passport running an Android build. The phone’s model is denoted as BlackBerry Passport SQW-ANDS, with the last letters apparently indicating an Android version of the handset.
After all, the rumors are for flagship specs like a QHD display and a Snapdragon 808 chipset, which might be one more thing to tip the scale for a switch. Specifically, the ‘Berry slider will supposedly feature a 5.1-inch screen with a 1440 x 2560 resolution, powered by an octa-core processor with a back and front camera combo of 16MP/5MP.
