It’s no secret that BlackBerry isn’t going to be making its own smartphones any more but their final internal handset, called Mercury (for now), is still a secretive device. Or, rather, it was. Or maybe it still is.

The final all-BlackBerry handset, codenamed Mercury, is definitely real. Its existence was confirmed by the company’s CEO, John Chen, in an interview with Crackberry last month, but little other information outside of the fact that BlackBerry is making one more QWERTY handset has been seen. We may have gotten a first look at the phone, however, thanks to a leak to Chinese social media service Weibo.

Unfortunately the leaked images haven’t been confirmed or corroborated as actually being Mercury, meaning that we might be looking at a hoax. If so, it’s a good one. The handset, which boasts a full QWERTY keyboard (in the finest BlackBerry tradition), looks like a mashed-together version of the PRIV, BlackBerry’s first Android effort, and the older Passport. It’s got the PRIV’s form factor without being a slide phone (so… a Passport then) but the keyboard isn’t quite as chunky or prominent as the Passport’s was.

No specs were released alongside the images but there has been some speculation about what Mercury would have in store when it launches. The talk is that a 4.5-inch 1080p display, octa-core processor, and 3GB of RAM would be the main specs. BlackBerry is supposedly also springing for an 18MP/8MP rear/front camera setup, with Android 7.0 running on the handset out of the box.

If this is the last BlackBerry phone, it at least promises to pack enough specs to keep us interested. It won’t be much of a wrench losing BB-made phones, though. BlackBerry has already released a few handsets that were created, on a hardware level, by other companies. The DTEK50 and DTEK60 handsets were made by TCL, the parent company of one Alcatel. You remember them, don’t you? We’re probably going to see them a little more often in future.

Source: via The Next Web