Back in December, BlackBerry CEO John Chen indicated that the company will design high-end phones for the enterprise sector only, and low end consumer devices for the emerging markets. Eventually, the company will address the high-end consumer market again, but not until the company can secure a steady flow of revenue.
That said, unnamed sources have confirmed that BlackBerry is working on a very high-end phone in addition to the rumored "Ontario" device. The phone will be based on the 20 nm Snapdragon MSM8994 eight-core 64-bit processor clocked up to 2.5 GHz. Other chip features will include 4 GB of LPDDR3-1600 PoP RAM, Adreno 430 graphics at 500 MHz, a pixel fill rate of 6 Gpix/s, support for DirectX 11.1 and more.
Meanwhile, a Geekbench Browser test revealed "Ontario" running BlackBerry 10.3, a quad-core Snapdragon 800 clocked at 2.15 GHz, and 2 GB of RAM. The previous BlackBerry flagship, the Z10, only had a dual-core processor. The Ontario phone is part of the company's "O" series while the QWERTY devices fall into the "W" series and the all-touch fall into the "B" series.
However, there's a question of whether the new CEO, John Chen, will nuke these two phones or not; employees have stated that both projects have yet to be cancelled, so there's still some hope. If they do make it to the market, the 64-bit phone likely won't appear until sometime next summer (2015).
Last month Terry Gou, chairman of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., indicated that the low end BlackBerry devices will make an appearance at World Mobile Congress 2014 later this month. The phones were assembled by Foxconn's mobile unit, FIH Mobile Limited. This subsidiary has agreed to help develop and make BlackBerry devices over the next five years.
"We are working with them to design a new device, and we will showcase multiple devices at the trade show in Barcelona in February," he said.
