A couple of months after a rendered image of the rumored BlackBerry Hamburg smartphone leaked online, a certain tweet revealed what could be the first actual picture of the device. Well, provided that it actually exists. In any case, Twitter user @the_malignant yesterday took to the popular microblogging platform to reveal a photo of a device he referred to as BlackBerry NEON, though it seems incredibly similar to the aforementioned BlackBerry Hamburg render. Furthermore, in a reply sent to one of the users who commented on this alleged leak, @the_malignant revealed that NEON is partially made out of aluminum.
To put things into context, the latest industry rumors claimed that BlackBerry and TCL could allegedly rebrand one of the Alcatel smartphones, more specifically – the Alcatel Idol 4 which was announced this past February. Sources report that the said device will be rebranded as a BlackBerry smartphone codenamed BlackBerry Hamburg. For those who are still having doubts, an Android-powered phone called BlackBerry Hamburg surfaced on GFXBench last month and would you believe it – it has identical specs to the Alcatel Idol 4. More specifically, it boasts a 5.2-inch display with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, 3GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 615 SoC with two quad-core Cortex-A53 processors, and a Qualcomm Adreno 405 GPU. It also features 16GB of internal storage, a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera, and an 8MP front-facing camera, the former of which boasts autofocus, face detection, and HDR while the latter can record 1080p video. Last but not least, the BlackBerry Hamburg listed on GFXBench is also running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and has all of the standard connectivity features such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and NFC. In possibly closely related news, Alcatel has recently released its Idol 4s smartphone in the United Kingdom rebranded as the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7. In other words, rebranding is definitely something within the realm of possibility when Alcatel is concerned.
So, it seems extremely likely that BlackBerry Hamburg exists and that it’s a rebranded Alcatel Idol 4. Of course, it remains to be seen whether it’ll be called NEON and there’s still no confirmation that it’ll look like the device depicted in the picture above, but an official confirmation is hopefully just around the corner.