So it appears that BlackBerry has more than one Android-powered device heading our way soon. This morning we heard about a device codenamed ‘Venice‘ which had pretty high-end specs including a 5.4-inch Quad HD display, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808. Now we’re hearing from the folks at N4BB, that there is another Android-powered smartphone coming from the Waterloo company. This one is codenamed ‘Prague’ and is destined for Emerging markets, according to the publication.
Seeing as this is destined for emerging markets, I wouldn’t expect a Quad HD display, and not a Snapdragon 808 either. The rumors are pointing at the device being a full touchscreen display, without a physical QWERTY keyboard. It’s going to be designed similar to the BlackBerry Z3. Prague is expected to be released in August of 2015, and that would be ahead of when the BlackBerry Venice slider, making this the first BlackBerry running Android to be available.
It’s looking more and more like Android is the future for Waterloo, but the company did recently announce that BlackBerry 10.3.3 is in the works. So it looks like BlackBerry isn’t going full Android, at least not yet. We could see BlackBerry continue to release hardware with BlackBerry 10 in the regions where they still have a bit of a marketshare, which is mostly Africa. We could also see the company allow users to either throw on Android or BlackBerry OS onto their devices. Although I’m sure more people would choose Android seeing as it has more apps and developer support than BlackBerry 10 does at this point.
It’s hard to remember the last time BlackBerry had a earnings report that didn’t use a lot of red ink. We’re not saying that using Android will change that, but it will be interesting to see how their fortunes change when Venice and Prague do become available. And how the Android community reacts to BlackBerry joining the party. There are a lot of die-hard BlackBerry fans out there that still want a phone with a physical keyboard, and no one’s really making them these days. That market, BlackBerry could take easily.