Zinwa Q27 Smartphone Offers a Fresh Grip on the Past with its BlackBerry-Like Design

BlackBerry phones previously ruled the day, their clicks and screens demanding your full attention. Now those days feel like a distant memory, buried deep beneath an endless sea of glass slabs. The Zinwa Q27, a prototype smartphone, however, brings it all back.

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Not a Blackberry, but here’s the prototype of Zinwa’s upcoming new phone

by u/warsbbeast1
in blackberry

Aesthetically, the body appears sturdy, with a somewhat familiar weight in your hand, while the back appears sleek, with glossy plastic curves. The main attraction, however, is a full-size QWERTY keyboard laid out for your thumbs to dance around the letters and numbers. The Alt and Shift keys are where you’d expect them, with symbols adjacent, as well as a large delete key and a space bar that is easy to reach. And there above them are those familiar function keys, which BlackBerry enthusiasts will know as their trusty tool belt. The left and right arrow buttons are used to navigate, a square displays your recently used apps, and a triangle returns you to the home screen. Right in the middle, there’s a small square hiding a little secret: it’s an optical fingerprint scanner, but it also serves as a teeny tiny touchpad, allowing you to nudge a cursor about the screen as in the old days.

Screen time begins with a 3.92 inch AMOLED display that packs a decent 1080 by 1240 pixel punch, giving vibrant colors, while the edges curve round to mix in nicely with the frame. The brightness rises high enough to let you to read in the middle of the day, and the resolution is precise enough to display emails and maps without straining your eyes. The keyboard retains its proper place beneath it, but the display remains the star of the show, providing some space for finger motions when you need a break from the keys. Android 16 is powering the entire thing, which is great because all of the gestures are overlaid on top of the physical controls, allowing everything to flow together seamlessly. As you type, predictions appear on the screen, and the software gradually learns your style.

Power comes from a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 CPU, offering 4 fast cores (Cortex-A78) combined with 4 more efficient ones (Cortex-A55) and a Mali-G615 GPU. We’re talking about 12 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAM to keep everything working smoothly, and storage capacity is 256 gigabytes at UFS 3.1 speed, complete with a microSD card for additional expansion. The cameras are fairly standard, with a 50 megapixel rear camera for decent images in good lighting and a 16 megapixel front-facing camera for video calls or selfies. The battery life is between 3500 and 4000 milliamp hours, which is suitable for a full day of chatting and streaming, and it recharges at 33 watts when plugged. WiFi 6E for fast downloads, Bluetooth 5.4 for reliable connections, and 5G on twin SIMs, one nano and one eSIM, with 4G LTE connectivity to fill any gaps.

BlackBerry echoes may still be heard deep down, but the Q27 is blazing its own road. Those tool belt keys replace the old call buttons with Android home buttons, serving as a modest admission that the way we interact with phones has changed. The fingerprint square is an extension of the previous trackpad, but this time it is secure and intelligent. Typing on the Q27 feels more like the old classics than the newer rivals: symbols and shifts are neatly arranged, allowing your thumbs to gain a feel for the keyboard and begin typing with better flow. The Q27’s glossy back and metal edges offer the quality feel that BlackBerrys used to have a few years ago, but the flat camera and stereo sound make the Q27 feel forward-thinking.

The Q27 release date is still a ways off, at least until the second quarter of 2026. Zinwa’s team, which began by converting BlackBerry Q20s into Android hybrids, has been incorporating lessons learned from prior builds into the Q27 and is still working out a few last issues.
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