BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen confirmed in a recent interview that the smartphone company is working on a new product that will sport a physical keyboard, a common feature of the company's past devices.

Chen confirmed that the physical keyboard will feature the ubiquitous QWERTY keys. However, he did not provide any details about the upcoming device, although rumors claim that the smartphone will feature a classic BlackBerry design.

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According to GSM Arena, the smartphone has an internal codename Mercury and is expected to sport a 4.5-inch Full HD touchscreen display with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Powering the device is a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset with an octa-core processor clocked at 2GHz. The phone is also rumored to have 3GB of memory and 23GB of storage space.

On the camera aspect, the phone will have an 18-megapixel rear facing main camera and an 8-megapxiel front facing camera for selfie shots and video calling, according to Express. The phone will have a 3400 mAh battery pack, and since it has a Qualcomm chipset, it will most likely support the company's fast charging technology. The phone is expected to run on Android 7.0 Nougat right out of the box.

BlackBerry's last two flagship devices, the DTEK50 and the DTEK60, were made by TCL. So some believe that the new smartphone will be created by a third-party manufacturer as well.

BlackBerry announced a new business model in September where instead of handling the manufacturing side of business, it will hand it over to a third-party manufacturer by licensing its brand and software.

TagsBlackberry, blackberry smartphone, Android, BlackBerry Android, Smartphone, Blackberry News