Blackberry to launch cheaper Android smartphones in 2016

In an interview with The National website, John Chen said that one of the smartphones will have a full touchscreen form factor while the other will come with a physical Qwerty keyboard

In an interview with The National website, John Chen said that one of the smartphones will have a full touchscreen form factor while the other will come with a physical Qwerty keyboard

Blackberry is yet to give up on its Android efforts as chief executive John Chen announced that the Canadian giant will launch two mid-range Android phones this year.

The last financial results of the company showed that it's expensive Priv smartphone, selling in India for ₹ 62,990, had failed miserably to drive up sales for the ailing company. The company had actually sold 600,000 units compared to Wall Street expectations of 850,000 units.

In an interview with The National website, Chen said that one of the smartphones will have a full touchscreen form factor while the other will come with a physical Qwerty keyboard. He also said that the prices of the smartphones will be around $300-400 (approximately ₹ 20,000 - ₹ 26,600).

However, Chen has admitted that the Android-based Priv smartphone "was too high-end a product" for enterprise customers and as a result the company cut down the price of the handset last week to $649 (approximately ₹ 43,000) down $50 (roughly ₹ 3,300) from the launch price of $699. The price cut has not been announced in India yet and the slider phone continues to retail for ₹62,990 via Amazon and offline retail stores.

Blackberry had launched the phone in February in India. It runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, features a 5.4-inch QHD (1440x2560 pixels) Amoled display and runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core processor (1.8GHz dual-core Cortex-A57, and 1.44GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) clubbed with 3GB of RAM; 32GB of expandable storage; 18-megapixel rear camera; 2-megapixel front-camera, and 3410mAh battery.