Just because they’re not making phones anymore doesn’t mean they’re not making phones anymore. BlackBerry has had to shift its business focus in order to stay afloat, moving away from hardware design and development. Instead, they’ll just rebrand existing phones to make their own, like with the current DTEK50. If you’re missing the old physical QWERTY interaction, don’t fear, because the BlackBerry keyboard is on its way back.

Company CEO John Chen had indicated last week that BlackBerry would “continue on” with selling smartphones for the time being. He also said that a model with the signature BlackBerry keyboard was in the works, but he wasn’t sure if it would ever be brought to market. BlackBerry VP of global device sales Alex Thurber is a little more confident.

“There will still be a keyboard-based BlackBerry device, designed and distributed within the next six months,” said Thurber. “I think there’s a demand for keyboard phones. As we’ve been showing mockups of what we’ve been working on, to our carrier and distributor partners, they are very excited about this.”

That sounds pretty definitive to me. It’ll likely be a BlackBerry-skinned Android experience like the Priv, but then the question arises as to whose hardware design they’re going to “borrow” to rebrand this time. Practically no one is making phones with physical keyboards these days, so maybe BlackBerry is going back to the drawing board one last time.

Via Globe and Mail

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