BlackBerry Venice: Rumous, Specs and Release Date

 This year, the Canadian BlackBerry company plans to introduce its first Android-smartphone, which likely will be named BlackBerry Venice.

The smartphone will be equipped with curved edges with the 5.7-inch screen, 808 Snapdragon processor, 3 GB of RAM, 18-megapixel camera and a slide-out QWERTY-keyboard like a BlackBerry Passport, including sensory possibilities for gesture control without the need to touch the screen.


Unlike last slider BlackBerry, the new device will be thinner. The unit comfortably in the hand and the slider mechanism works easily and smoothly.

The software will include BlackBerry Hub, Google services, and universal search that allows you to simultaneously search the Web, contacts, and all content on the smartphone. Announcement of new items is expected in November this year and the start of sales will take place on the eve of New Year holidays.

Rumors started several months ago

A Blackberry phone with a codename of Venice leaked back in June, and was believed to be running Android. It was slated to arrive in November with the following specs: a 5.4-inch Quad-HD screen, a 1.8GHz 64-bit hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB RAM, as well as an 18-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

Leaked photos of the Venice and possible marketing materials suggest the phone will have complete access to Google’s apps. Early on, the Chromecast icon appeared in the renders, for example. The latest picture of the phone shows a wide variety of Android apps that aren’t available for BlackBerry phones, including Google Maps, Hangouts, Google Calendar, and most importantly, Google Play.

In addition to the presentation slides  — which also showed an image of the previously leaked 18-megapixel rear camera — another two slides were added to the collection by Evan Blass on his Twitter account, this time showing the phone with Google Play on the screen, and one referencing a content transfer app. In this slide, reference is made to an “Android BlackBerry device.”



BlackBerry Priv release date

It's expected that the BlackBerry Priv will launch in November (possibly 16 November) and is said to be coming to all four US carriers. BlackBerry has officially confirmed it will be some time later this calendar year (2015).

There is currently no word on a UK release or even pricing, but we suspect that BlackBerry will be aiming for a parallel launch globally and we're expecting more information in the coming weeks.