Despite a dramatically changed operating system with BlackBerry 10 and two new smartphones, the touchscreen BlackBerry Z10 and the keyboard-equipped BlackBerry Q10 , the company is still struggling to make an impact. With that in mind, new smartphones may be the only way to go and leaked images would appear to show what BlackBerry has in mind with the Z30 and Z15.
First up, the Z30 information comes from a tutorial embedded in BlackBerry OS 10.2.0.1047 and was discovered by Crackberry . This phone has been mentioned before, although it was originally codenamed the A10.
According to leaked specifications it will have a 5in screen (up from 4.2in on the Z10) with a 720p screen (we'd bet on it having the same 1,280x768 resolution of the Z10), and a Qualcomm SoC with a 1.7GHz dual-core Krait CPU and a quad-core Adreno GPU. To us, this doesn't sound significantly different from the Z10 and the phone seems lack the high-end specs to let it compete with high-end Android devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 . We don't have a UK launch date or price for this model.
The BlackBerry Z30 has a larger screen than the Z10, but we're not sure it's a big enough improvement
Next up, BlackBerry Blog has alleged renders of the Z15, which is a handset that we hadn't heard about before. There are no specs, but you can see from the images that this is a slider phone.
The alleged BlackBerry Z15 is a slider phone, but with no other details, this render may well not be official
A slider makes sense in a lot of ways. We felt as the Q10 was hampered by its small touchscreen, although we liked its keyboard. Having a large touchscreen, but still being able to get at a proper keyboard would solve that problem. However, this could just be an image dreamt up someone that would like to see that design and with no other information, the Z15 sounds a lot less likely than the Z30.