BlackBerry recently bowed out of the smartphone business properly by announcing that it has inked an exclusive agreement with China-based TCL to manufacture and sell devices with the iconic BB brand. The Canadian company will no longer be making its own devices but there have been rumors about one device that it was working on prior to essentially doing away with its handset business. Rumor has it that the BlackBerry Mercury release will take place with Verizon in the United States.
The handset that BlackBerry is believed to have worked on prior to inking the deal with TCL is codenamed Mercury. A purported render of the BlackBerry Mercury was leaked online recently. It shows that the handset might feature a dual-edge curved display as well as a full QWERTY keyboard that has a fingerprint sensor embedded underneath the space bar.
Aside from its 4.5 inch curved display, the BlackBerry Mercury is believed to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor and a big enough battery that’s capable of powering the device for two straight days.
This is all that’s known about the handset at this point in time. It’s now claimed that the BlackBerry Mercury release will eventually take place in the coming months and that Verizon will be carrying it in the United States.
Neither BlackBerry nor Verizon has confirmed anything about this device so it’s best to take this with a grain of salt until there’s more information.