Leaked BlackBerry Vienna sports all-metal design, keyboard, Android

By David Curry November 12, 2015

BlackBerry chief executive John Chen said in a Fox Business News interview that the company has a “range of products” coming after the BlackBerry Priv, and the first one may have been leaked earlier today.

CrackBerry managed to get a hold of a few press snaps of the codenamed BlackBerry Vienna, which sports an always-present physical keyboard in favor of the retractable keyboard found on the Priv.

It looks like BlackBerry will add a brushed metal finish to the smartphone, available in silver, black, dark blue, dark green, and red. Vienna may use capacitive buttons instead of software buttons found on the Priv. A front-facing mono speaker sits at the top of the phone, alongside a front-facing camera. Volume and power buttons are located on the right side of the device, and on the other side a MicroSD or SIM card slot.

We don’t know the megapixel size of Vienna’s camera, but the sensor looks smaller than the 18-megapixel OIS camera on the Priv. We wouldn’t be surprised to see it downgraded to an 8-megapixel or 13-megapixel sensor, similar to most mid-range Android devices.

The BlackBerry Priv is the flagship smartphone for the company, so we suspect the Vienna will fit below as a mid-range option for customers that want a physical keyboard but don’t want to pay $700. John Chen confirmed in the FBN interview that the roadmap for BlackBerry will be centered on Android, so we suspect the Vienna will run Android 5.1 Lollipop or Android 6.0 Marshmallow, depending on its release date.

BlackBerry’s security suite will most likely be available on the Vienna, as it is one of the major selling points for choosing BlackBerry over other Android providers. Since all of the apps have been added to Google Play already, it shouldn’t be hard for BlackBerry to add support for Vienna.

The dimensions, specs, price, and release date remain a mystery, but we will continue to update this post with any updates.

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