A new listing on Geekbench for the BlackBerry BBG100-1 might be the BlackBerry Ghost handset, which is expected to come to India soon. Achieving a single-core score of 698 and a multi-core score of 3656, the BBG100-1 runs on the Snapdragon 625 chipset.
Qualcomm’s 600-series is meant for budget smartphones, and the Snapdragon 625 is probably one of the most extensively used chipsets. Though the Snapdragon 636, 630 and 626 are arguably upgrades to the 625, they’re also more expensive. Even when Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 4 and Redmi 4, they had the Snapdragon 625 under the hood since the chipset manages power and battery efficiently.
That being said, when the KeyOne launched in 2017, it also had the Snapdragon 625 and was considered unreasonably expensive at nearly Rs 40,000. The price of the BlackBerry Ghost hasn’t been revealed, but it should in all fairness, should be under Rs 20,000 with that particular chipset.
On the other hand, the BlackBerry Ghost is also speculated to be a ‘premium’ device. The specifications in the leak don’t match up to those of a high-end smartphone. There’s a possibility that this may be a third, entirely new, variant of the BlackBerry Ghost, the other being BlackBerry Ghost Pro.
Either way the company licensed to manufacture BlackBerry phones in India, Optiemus, is yet to launch a smartphone under their banner. Reports and rumours have indicated that status-quo will change in 2018, but the action on that front is yet to be seen.
