BlackBerry will roll out an all-touchscreen smartphone in November - the BlackBerry A10, which will hit the market just in time for the shopping frenzy during the holiday season.
This was first reported by CNET, which suggested that the A10 was the device that BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins referred to during an earlier interview.
"There's one new product I'm excited about, but I can't really share it," Heins said during in a conversation with CNET in March.
CNET also reported that Sprint Nextel had intentionally passed on the BlacBerry Z10 so it can carry the A10. The service provider will start selling the BlackBerry flagship phone starting November.
Sprint has not listed the A10 as its top-tier handset yet but that can still change as the release date approaches. Sprint still has to announce the availability of the QWERTY keywboard-equipped Q10, which has already landed on th shelves of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T.
The BlackBerry A10 will be replacing the current Z10, which means the Q10 will be positioned just above the entry-level Q5 in the BlackBerry lineup. The A10 is reportedly the BlackBerry Aristo prototype that has been held by a certain craigger of the user forums at Crackberry. Craigger played tennis with a BlackBerry developer, who was allegedly using an Aristo.
The forum member described the phone as looking very like the Samsung Galaxy S4 but not as square-looking as the Z10. The A10 was running on 10.2 operating system and has about 2GB of RAM. It also has a backup feature that allows wireless backup procedures with a paired device.
According to a report on Crackberry, the Aristo prototype runs on a 1.5GHz quadcore chip and has a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display. BlackBerry is still mum about the official specifications of the A10.
With the release of the A10, BlackBerry is hoping to cover all market segments even as it tries to prove that the brand is not only limited to QWERTY phones that it has been known for.
