BlackBerry is not quite ready to roll over and die, but phones like the BlackBerry Magnum shown in a fresh set of leaked images won’t make its fight for survival any easier in a world dominated by iOS and Android devices. CrackBerry has found a few pictures on Weibo that show a Bold-like BlackBerry Magnum, although it’s not clear whether such a device will launch anytime soon.
Very old reports detailed a BlackBerry Magnum handset that was eventually scraped, with the phone being “essentially a mix of the Bold 9000 and a BackBerry Storm.”
These new images show a BlackBerry smartphone that packs both a touchscreen display and a full QWERTY keyboard, and it’s apparently based on the Bold 9900. “Judging from the images, it looks like BlackBerry scrapped the 9000 design and in this case built out a Bold 9900 version of the Magnum with a bit of BlackBerry Q10 flavor by removing the tool belt for testing purposes,” CrackBerry notes.
Interestingly, BlackBerry has recently confirmed the Bold 9900 will make a triumphant return, which could explain the new image leaks. At around the same time, many reports analyzing the current smartphone market revealed that BlackBerry’s market share in the U.S. – one of the most important smartphone markets in the world – is currently somewhere just above 1%.
The images showing the BlackBerry Magnum prototype in all its thickness follow below.
