BlackBerry Leap Announced

BlackBerry has announced a new phone for the younger market. The BlackBerry Leap, as it is called, ditches the physical keyboard in exchange for a full touchscreen—a bold step from last year’s keyboard-dependent devices. BlackBerry markets the Leap as the ideal phone for young professionals and companies “who value security and privacy” on top of a “modern and powerful design package.”

The main selling features of the BlackBerry Leap are its large screen, long battery life, and virtual keyboard, which BlackBerry claims will boost one’s productivity to the next level. The Leap features a 5-inch HD display with a 1,280 x 720 resolution, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera.

Under the hood, a Qualcomm MSM 8960 processor clocked at 1.5GHz powers it. All that oomph are supported by a 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and an expandable memory of up to 128GB. A 2,800mAh non-removable Lithium-ion battery, microUSB, LTE and Wi-Fi support are also noteworthy features. Additionally, the device is running BlackBerry’s latest operating system, which is praised for its security.

BlackBerry says that the Leap is designed with the highest standards of security in mind to protect the privacy of its users—the phone supports encryption and has a built-in malware protection, backup, wipe, and restore capabilities. Lastly, BlackBerry has enhanced its virtual keyboard for the Leap, making it faster and more accurate. The keyboard comes with error correction and multi-language support. The price and availability was not announced.