The Blackberry Mercury is rumored to arrive soon after new live images of the handset surfaced. Talks of the Blackberry Mercury started in June 2016, although an official launch date has yet to be announced.
Blackberry Mercury Confirmed to Feature QWERTY Keyboard
GSM Arena reported that the Blackberry Mercury was spotted on GeekBench in October, while CEO John Chen confirmed that it was in the works in November. The alleged live images of the Blackberry Mercury provided more details about the handset.
These include a 4.5-inch display with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a QWERTY keyboard, a prominent selfie camera and what appear to be ambient light sensors on the opposite side of the earpiece. The Blackberry Mercury is said to feature a Qualcomm 2.0GHz chipset, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, an 18-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front shooter.
Based on the new images, the Blackberry Mercury may run on Android, which has been the norm since the Blackberry Priv. According to the images, the out-of-the-box OS does not seem to be Android 7.0 Nougat, although an update is expected to roll out at a later date.
Following the Blackberry Priv
Phone Arena stated that the DTEK50 and DTEK60 were the last two Android-power Blackberry smartphones, named after the Blackberry DTEK Android security app that started on the Blackberry Priv. The Blackberry Mercury is rumored to be the last Blackberry handset with a physical QWERTY keyboard to be developed in-house.
Based on the leaked images, the Blackberry Mercury will look much like the Blackberry Passport, although less square. The Passport also featured a physical QWERTY keyboard.
When the Blackberry Mercury appeared on Geekbench with model number BBB100-1, it was shown to have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor with a clock speed of 2.02GHz for the test. The tested handset featured 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory.
The 4.5-inch display was the same as the Blackberry Passport, with a resolution of 720 x 1280. The Blackberry Mercury also had a 3400mAh battery and pre-installed Android OS. The Blackberry Mercury is expected to launch in 2017.
