ominent leaker Blass took to Twitter to drop two big hints. The first appears to be promotional material that shows a BlackBerry device running Android accessing the ay Store. The other tease is for BlackBerry’s email app secure data transfer tool.
— Blass (@evleaks) August 19, 2015 Blass’s second goodie illustrates that the device will indeed have a slide-out keyboard.
— Blass (@evleaks) August 19, 2015 The big questions is to what degree BlackBerry will fork Android. Expect some preinstalled apps, as the screenshot shows Bing, bEX, BBC. It’s also a lock that BlackBerry’s own BBM will be part of the package. The big selling point BlackBerry could bring is security. The company could market the Venice as a more secure version of Android, free of all those pesky Stagefright scares. November isn’t that far away, so look for more details to come soon. y this matters: Going with Android sounds like a really smart decision on the part of BlackBerry. There hasn’t been a popular, mainstream Android device with a slide-out keyboard since the original Motorola Droid series. ile software keyboards like SwiftKey do a good job, there may be a sizable enough group out there that longs for the days of a physical keyboard. Given BlackBerry’s miniscule market share, they’ve got little to lose.
