As we’ve discovered over the past few months, BlackBerry under Thorsten Heins was a very different outfit than the current, streamlined, pared-down and focused company we see under John Chen.
As a result, many of the projects that may have eventually seen the light of day have been discarded or cancelled. And though BlackBerry is still making new handsets, announcing the low-cost Z3 and “classic design” Q20 for later this year, it’s feasible that a few prototype designs were in the works long before Chen took over.
A site called techguyzz has uncovered a 5-inch square BlackBerry display panel, destined to be used for a now-defunct Q10 successor. The BlackBerry Q10 was announced in January 2013 and sports a 3.1-inch 720×720 pixel display with a pixel density of 328ppi. A 5-inch screen with the same 1:1 aspect ratio would be unlikely to keep the same 720p resolution, so BlackBerry would have had to work another standard, perhaps 1440×1440, into BlackBerry 10’s framework.
The screen may be fake, or could just be the remnant of a failed experiment within then walls of Waterloo’s most famous OEM, but it’s unlikely to ever see the light of day. A 5-inch display in such a form factor would be so wide — the equivalent of a 6.5-inch widescreen device — that the hardware keyboard would be incredibly spacious, but would be comically wide. Think the LG Vu but with a keyboard underneath.
