The company only revealed a quick glimpse of the sliding Blackberry 10, nicknamed "Venice," when it was announced at Mobile World Congress last month, N4BB reports. Reuters reported rumours that the company was planning to release a smartphone using Google's operating system earlier in June.
Blass initially caused some confusion after sharing this image:
His previous tweet had claimed that the "Android-powered BlackBerry Venice slider is AT&T-bound," making people think that the image he had shared was a sliding device running Google's operating system. While some reports guessed that the physical keyboard in the image above might slide over the on-screen keys, this wasn't the case. The image turned out to be a Blackberry Passport:
There seems to be some confusion -- sorry for being obtuse. This is no slider, it's just a Passport: https://t.co/0AExZulvMy
He finally shared an image of what appears to be the "Venice," the Blackberry 10 sliding smartphone, which is expected to run on Android and launch in November:
The line of Blackberry 10 devices haven't performed particularly well against the iPhone and a number of Android smartphones. Part of that reason because the phones don't run very many big names apps, so Blackberry could mean to take advantage of those running on Android by switching to Google's operating system.
Blackberry used to dominate the smartphone market, but now only has a market share of 1%, according to Reuters.