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BlackBerry’s set to unveil a new flagship 5-inch touchscreen phone called the A10 later this year — and apparently it looks a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S4.
That’s according to sources quoted by Boy Genius Report, which reckons the A10 is an effort to take on powerhouses like the S4 and HTC One, although it’s packing a mere dual-core processor alongside 2GB of RAM.
BGR’s sources reckon that’s either because quad-core chips drain battery life too quickly, or the BlackBerry 10 software doesn’t work properly on four cores — it could be both, of course.
The new blower is said to be more rounded than the angular BlackBerry Z10, making it resemble Samsung’s enormously popular flagship phone.
Other specs are thin on the ground, with only an unconfirmed expectation of an 8-megapixel camera on offer, and a late autumn release date.
Another BlackBerry, the 9720, has also been spotted, with a more familiar Qwerty styling. It replaces the 9320 in the Canadian company’s lineup, so should be relatively cheap.
BlackBerry’s so far released three phones running its new BB10 software — the touchscreen Z10 and the Qwerty Q10 and Q5 — and they’ve all been overpriced. While they’re not badly built devices, they’re underpowered compared to similarly priced Androids and the software is buggy and often unintuitive. An understocked app store doesn’t help either.
The company has a real struggle to turn itself around, with its market share absolutely collapsing in the last year, even in developing countries such as Brazil, where its low-budget phones have traditionally done well.
As well as Android, BlackBerry faces new competition from bare-bones smart phone OSes such as Firefox, which recently appeared on its first phone in Spain — the staggeringly cheap ZTE Open.
Can a relatively high-spec 5-inch phone turn things round for BlackBerry? Or is it utterly doomed? Lay out your turnaround plans in the comments below, or on our highly successful Facebook page.
