The rumour of a ‘stable’, well, two Blackberry handsets running Android has again surfaced with a live video of a Blackberry Passport running Android showing up in the wild.
The rumoured Android version of the Blackberry Passport first surfaced with the rumoured, though seemingly very much alive portrait slider Blackberry Venice back in early July by everyone’s favourite leaker Evan Blass, who further added fuel to the Android Passport earlier this week with another tweet about the phone.
https://twitter.com/evleaks/status/633900483787247616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The phone is apparently quite real, or at least there’s a Passport out there running Android, with Brazilian site Dudu Rocha Tec releasing a YouTube video showing off the handset (Skip to around the 5 min mark for the hands-on).
The video shows off a very nice looking Android build, though heavily customised with Blackberry apps including of course Blackberry Messenger and their camera app. This goes in-line with another tweet from Evan, which advised the Blackberry Android phone was definitely NOT a stock device, before listing APKs (Android apps) running on the Blackberry Android build.
https://twitter.com/evleaks/status/634740552639102976
The Blackberry Passport is a square, 1:1 aspect ratio phone which launched here in Australia back in October last year. The aging handset is a little long in the tooth spec wise running a Qualcomm MSM8974AA Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM with a 4.5″ 1440×1440 pixel (453 dpi) HD display, 32GB of storage and a microSD card slot. Whether Blackberry would repurpose the existing hardware with Android software is unknown at this stage.
With a rumoured US launch in November for the Venice Slider, the Blackberry Passport version could be running pretty close behind. We’ll possibly see more of this in the future – hardware keyboard lovers, it could be your time.
Just wondering if anyone else noticed the strange pixelation around the edge of the screen on the device. It seemed to be added to the video as his finger had the pixelation on it where it passed through the edge of the screen.
Yeah, kinda weird. Doesn’t seem to be blurring any identifying marks or personal info. Not sure.
Fake no doubt.