It is no secret that BlackBerry is gearing up to release its first Android smartphones since it unveiled the PRIV last year.
Over the course of the last few days, we have come to learn that the Canadian company had teamed up with Chinese device maker TCL to make its next batch of Android smartphones.
As we had previously noted, the new BlackBerry smartphones including one codenamed Neon, will be modeled around some of TCL’s latest devices like the Alcatel Idol 4. That is now fully confirmed by the first set of “live” images of the device originating from BlackBerry’s website.
This is not our first look at the ‘Neon’, though. The device had shown up earlier in a render that first corroborated the news of TCL’s pair up with the Waterloo-based BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry ‘Neon’ aka DTEK50 is expected to pack a 5.2-inch full HD display, a pair of 13 and 8-megapixel cameras on the back and front respectively, 16GB internal storage, 3GB RAM, a Snapdragon 617 processor and a 2,610mAh battery.
Just as was the case with the PRIV, the ‘Neon’, though running on Android and not BlackBerry’s own BB10 OS, will still have notable features from BlackBerry’s own platform built in. These include the BlackBerry Hub, DTEK among several other BlackBerry apps.
BlackBerry is also expected to reveal at least two other Android-based devices which we only know by their reported internal codenames, Argon and Mercury. Even though the company has been tight-lipped on ever returning to making BB10 OS devices, its Chief Operating Officer, Marty Beard told Bloomberg recently that the company had not entirely abandoned the platform, raising hopes that we may get to see the company release BB10 OS-based devices, after all.
