Leaked photos believed to be that of the BlackBerry Mercury smartphone recently surfaced on a Chinese social networking platform and was immediately the subject of discussions on several tech forums. The leaked photo revealed that the BlackBerry Mercury will run on the Android operating system and will feature BlackBerry's ubiquitous QWERTY physical keyboard.

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The Canadian-based smartphone manufacturer released the BlackBerry Priv, which ditched the traditional physical keyboard in November 2015, according to Hot Hardware. The phone was not a big success, and perhaps, this is the reason why BlackBerry is employing a classic design feature that has made the company famous in the past.

Two photos were posted on Weibo. Not much can be surmised on these two photos, but they did show the physical keyboard. In November, BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen said, "We have one keyboard phone I promised people. It's coming."

Rumors claim that the BlackBerry Mercury will have a Qualcomm chipset with a processor clocked at 2GHz. The phone is expected to sport at least 3GB of memory and 32GB of storage space. The phone will have a 4.5-inch display with a 3:2 ratio, according to GSM Arena.

The two leaked photos reveal the earpiece in between the front facing camera on its left and the proximity and ambient sensors on the right. The front facing camera is expected to be 8 megapixels, while the rear facing main camera is expected to be 18 megapixels.

Based on the leaked photos, the BlackBerry Mercury will run on the Android platform, although it is hard to tell whether it is the latest version which is Android 7.0 Nougat.

TagsBlackberry, qwerty, physical keyboard, blackberry mercury, Android, Android BlackBerry, android physical keyboard