We’ve not heard much about Blackberry since the low key unveiling of the Blackberry Z30 and that Blackberry Porsche Design P’9982 last year. This may continue to be so throughout 2014 but it won’t be the case in 2015 if leaks thanks to benchmarking app GeekBench as spotted by N4BB.
The Blackberry device in question is rumoured to be codenamed “Ontario” and will apparently be part of a certain O-series. What makes it special? An octa-core Snapdragon MSM8994 chip that utilizes the 64 bit architecture. Of course unlike all the chips we saw when this started being the in-thing, each of those will be able to crank up to a maximum 2.5 GHz and run concurrently. I don’t knwo if you need all that power in a Blackberry device but isn’t it time time to welcome the Canadians to the specs race?
Previous leaks had indicated that the Snapdragon 800 was to be the go-to chip for Blackberry’s new device but that will only be true if Waterloo has plans for 2014 else the MSM8944 sounds real even though we’re yet to know much about it. In addition to its 20 nm HKMG process, the chip is said to also support an Adreno 430 GPU, OpenGL ES3.0 and 4 GB RAM.
In addition to the rumoured O-series, Blackberry is also said to be making B and W series devices whereby the former will be all-touch while the latter will stick with Blackberry’s traditional QWERTY physical keyboard but will all have a Qualcomm-made Snapdragon chip (MSM8974).
Blackberry’s path to revival began in earnest late last year with the appointment of John Chen as the CEO and Chairman of the company’s board. Let’s see if these efforts will bring Blackberry back to profitability in addition to its increased focus on the enterprise market.
