For anyone out there still excited for BlackBerry 10 smartphones, a new product rendering of the so-called “BlackBerry London” is now making the rounds. The image, from a leaked product roadmap, first appeared on CrackBerry.com.
This isn’t the first time a BlackBerry 10 phone codenamed “London” has been leaked to the press, but this phone is more buttoned-down than the BlackBerry London rendering we saw last year. It’s clad in all black, instead of silver trim on the top and bottom sides, and it’s round at the edges. In CrackBerry’s words, it’s like a “phonified BlackBerry PlayBook.”
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Consistent with what we’ve seen before, the London doesn’t have any hardware buttons on the face. If this holds true for the final product, BlackBerry 10 phones will use the same swipe-based navigation as the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Presumably, you’ll swipe up from the bottom to call up the home screen, down from the top to open menus, and left or right to quickly switch between apps.
Not much we can tell besides that. Rumored specs include a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 16 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera in the back and a 2-megapixel camera up front. CrackBerry says this may be a U.K. exclusive, with two other models (“Laguna” and “Lisbon”) launching on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon in the United States. This is all scheduled to go down in the second half of 2012–hopefully sooner than later, for RIM’s sake.
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