Blackberry to Release Three New Android Phones in 2016 and 2017

Blackberry has been flagging for some time now, suffering from lacklustre sales and poor brand image. When Facebook discontinued its WhatsApp service on Blackberry phones earlier this year, some took calling it the death knell for the one-time successful phone-maker.

When the company recently announced that it would discontinue its clickable keyboard-equipped Classic model, the talk of Blackberry’s imminent withdrawal from smartphone-manufacturing intensified. Bloomberg reports that the many took the announcement as tacit notice that the company was abandoning its proprietary BB10 operating system, which developers have stopped building applications for.

Now CEO John Chen is announcing that the company is planning on releasing as many as three new phones in the coming year.

According to tech outlet N4BB, the three phones are codenamed Neon, Argon, and Mercury. Chen has suggested that the new devices will be working on the Android operating system and has made public his plans to make Blackberry’s handset business profitable by the end of September.

Many analysts are critical of such suggestions, and argue that the only way to restore market confidence in Blackberry is by cutting phones off completely.

While details of the new devices are scant, N4BB is quoting an unidentified source and reporting that Neon will be the first of the handsets to arrive this year, featuring a 5.2 inch, 1080p touch display and lacking a keyboard.

The source also suggested that the Neon would feature an aluminum frame, an 8MP front camera, 13MP rear camera, 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 617 processor.

In addition, N4BB is reporting that Argon will follow shortly after Neon, and that Mercury will be released last.