Blackberry is reportedly working on an Android phone codenamed Venice.
On Friday leaked renders of a BlackBerry smartphone running on Android OS circulated the web. There is now a lot of speculation that BlackBerry’s next smartphone will use the mobile operating system developed by Google.
The image shows a BlackBerry smartphone running Android OS. Source: (Evan Blass (Twitter)
Earlier this year BlackBerry unveiled a slider phone at the Mobile World Congress 2015 and the rendered image looks strikingly similar.
However, the phone shown at MWC appeared to be running BlackBerry’s own BB10 OS, according to TechCrunch.
A high-resolution render of the device running Android was posted by Evan Blass (aka @evleaks) on Twitter.
The phone has curves on both halves of its display – similar to the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. It has a speaker at the bottom and appears not to have dedicated Send and End keys.
If BlackBerry does release an Android smartphone it will be one of the first Android devices with a decent physical keyboard.
BlackBerry has struggled to retain market share over the past year
The popularity of Blackberry OS has continued to decrease across regions. According to Gartner, BlackBerry phones accounted for 0.4% of all smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2015, BlackBerry’s overall device sales dropped in Q1 2015 to only 1.3 million units, from 1.7 million in Q1 2014.