BlackBerry unveils 5-inch full-touch 'Leap' smartphone

BlackBerry has announced a new smartphone called the Leap at the MWC trade show  in Barcelona, Spain. The Leap is a mid-ranger offering from the company, which sports a design that resembles Z3 budget smartphone that was launched in 2014.

By comparison Leap appears to be an upgraded version of the Z3, which was powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU and had 1.5GB of RAM. The Leap, offers a slightly better processor, more RAM, an upgraded 8-megapixel camera and packs a large battery.

Coming to its specs, the BlackBerry Leap features a 5-inch 720p HD display and is powered by the rather outdated Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus dual-core processor, clocked at 1.5GHz. The processor was earlier seen in the Z10 and Q10 smartphones, which were the first BlackBerry smartphones to be powered by BB10.

The handset packs 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot, which supports up to 128GB of storage. The Leap runs on BlackBerry OS 10.3.1 out of the box.

Camera features include an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and can shoot 1080p video at 30 frames per second.  On the front, it has a 2-megapixel camera.

The battery under the soft touch back cover is 2800mAh and is non-removable. BlackBerry claims that the phone can last up to 25 hours with heavy usage. The Leap measures 9.5mm and weighs 170 grams. It supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, FM radio and 4G LTE.

BlackBerry says the "Leap" will launch in the US for $275 (Rs 17,000) 

Check out the promo video and the hands on video of the BlackBerry Leap.