The rumors just keep coming about the BlackBerry Venice, BlackBerry's upcoming slider smartphone that is hotly rumored to run not on its own BlackBerry OS 10 but on Google's Android.
The latest we have gleaned from the swiftly spinning rumor mill is a new leaked image of what is allegedly the Venice featuring an onscreen keyboard that looks very much like the keyboard on many Android phones.
The Venice, which was teased by its Canadian maker at the Mobile World Congress back in March, is a slider phone with a physical keyboard that slides out from under the display that allows for faster, easier use when typing out longer emails or documents. However, for one-off, quick notes or texts, an onscreen keyboard is more convenient to use.
The image, which first surfaced on the CrackBerry user forums, shows the Venice with an Android-looking keyboard, with the familiar back button placed at the bottom of the keyboard. If the phone shown in the image is really the Venice, then it is one more addition to the growing pile of evidence that BlackBerry's upcoming handset will eschew its own operating system and go for Android instead.
Just last week, Twitter leaker Evan Blass got hold of a Venice render featuring a multitude of Google apps on the handset's home screen. This was quickly followed by another slew of images, this time unveiled by CrackBerry, showcasing the phone's 18MP camera with optical image stabilization and, possibly, support for Chromecast, Google's streaming TV dongle, which further reinforces the idea that the Venice will indeed run on Android.
The BlackBerry Venice is expected to be officially unveiled in November, with the possibility the BlackBerry might launch the phone a little bit earlier. So far, the rumor mill has pegged the Venice to run on a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 and 3GB of RAM. It will reportedly have a 5.4-inch capacitive touchscreen display with a Quad HD resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels.
Aside from OIS, the primary camera will also have LED flash, autofocus and video recording, while the front-facing secondary camera will have 5 megapixels.
It is believed that Google is not the only company that BlackBerry has teamed up with, as reports claim the Venice will come preinstalled with a number of Microsoft's apps, particularly productivity apps aimed at enterprises, including Skype and Bing.
