BlackBerry’s current flagship is the Z30, a BB10-powered smartphone that was released in Canada on October 15th of last year. So it’s time that the Waterloo-based manufacturer comes out with a new device and it could very well be the heavily rumoured Ontario and Windermere.
The “Ontario” recently popped up in a benchmarking test, reportedly sporting a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM and running BlackBerry OS 10.3. As for the Windermere, a report from BGR believes that BlackBerry is targeting this device with a new keyboard design. (The image above is some sort of unknown prototype design)
The Windermere will apparently be “wider than any other BlackBerry,” which the largest one to-date is the 5-inch Z30, and the reason behind this is because the keyboard has “three rows of keys instead of the traditional four and all of the keys are touch sensitive.” The idea would be to give users the option to either press on the keys as they currently do, or use it in a similar fashion to how Swype operates where users swipe their finger over the respected keys. This might improve productivity on the keyboard and also improve accuracy. If this comes to life it would be interesting to see how they would tie it into the current philosophy of “learns your writing style as you type.”
In addition, BlackBerry apparently is considering bringing in more multitasking features into the OS. The company is considering letting users run two apps on screen at the same time side by side.
There is no timing yet for the launch of the Windermere, or if it’ll actually come to market.
Source: BGR
Via: CrackBerry
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