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If we were to turn the clocks back just five, possibly ten years, then many of us might be using BlackBerries, with there being no way that something better would pry them from our hands. Exactly that happened for the Canadian firm, and since they lost their grip on the smartphone market, the company has become smaller and smaller in both size as well as influence. The firm is certainly not giving up however, as BlackBerry have finally, at long last, turned to Android and since last year’s BlackBerry PRIV, all of their devices now seem set to ship with Android onboard. Their latest, the BlackBerry Neon, also known as the DTEK50, has recently appeared in another fresh batch of pictures, giving us a closer look at the latest BlackBerry.
As we already saw in the FCC documents, and can now see more clearly in these leaked images, the BlackBerry Neon appears to be more of your traditional smartphone. These images show a sleek device with nothing on the front panel, save for the 5.2-inch 1920 x 1080 display and an earpiece, there’s no slide-up keyboard as with the BlackBerry PRIV here. Under-the-hood appears to be a Snapdragon 617 CPU alongside 3GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage. Around the back, there’s a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera with an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, all of which is powered by a 2,610 mAh battery. So, it would seem that while the Neon is set to become a more traditional smartphone from BlackBerry, it’s also set to become a more affordable device as well. The Snapdragon 617 is far from a high-end CPU, and that smaller battery isn’t something you’d expect in a higher-end model.
This could be beneficial for BlackBerry, as many felt that the PRIV was just too high an asking price for a device that many modern smartphone users had either never used before, or just lost interest in over the past five years or more. With Android 6.0 Marshmallow likely to be onboard, BlackBerry’s custom software such as BBM, DTEK security, the BlackBerry email and calendar apps and so on will all come preloaded. Whether or not this device is to be called the BlackBerry Neon when it launches is still unclear, but it’s unlikely they will launch the device with its model number of DTEK50 alone.
