BlackBerry Hamburg benchmark suggests a move towards the mid-range

BlackBerry Priv

Back in April BlackBerry CEO John Chen confirmed that the company would be bringing out two new Android phones this year and now one of them has popped up on a benchmark, giving us a look at the specs.

The phone, believed to be codenamed the BlackBerry Hamburg, has been spotted on GFXBench by BlackBerries.ru and it paints a mid-range picture, with a 5.2-inch 1080p screen, a 1.5GHz octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor, 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a 12MP rear camera and a 7MP (or possibly 8MP) front-facing one.

The small number of leaks suggests the Hamburg probably won't be launching for a while. It's also benchmarked as running Android Marshmallow rather than Android N, though there's a good chance BlackBerry will ultimately update it.

Fixing a mistake

Those specs as a whole would be a significant step down from the flagship BlackBerry Priv, but that's no surprise, as Chen revealed that he believed the Priv was a mistake, as it was too expensive for many of its enterprise customers.

So, while the benchmark could certainly be a fake, it lines up with what we're expecting to see and further suggests that BlackBerry could be moving away from high-end hardware, at least for the time being.

The design of the BlackBerry Hamburg remains a mystery, but it's not expected to have a keyboard. If you do want a keyboard a phone codenamed the BlackBerry Rome is also thought to be landing later this year.

That too is likely to be mid-range, though no spec details have yet been revealed, and it's thought that both phones will launch for under US$500 (around £350, AU$659).

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.