Is this short and square phone really the BlackBerry Q30?

Blackberry has been awful quiet about releasing new smartphones since the Z30, but we may have finally caught our first glimpse of its next entry, "Windermere."

New pictures of Windermere have surfaced on the tech blog N4BB and to be honest, the smartphone is surprisingly square.

No, it hasn't been cropped, if you're wondering. This is the phone's square body, one that's reminiscent of a playing card, if you ask us.

Windermere, or the Q30 as it has been unofficially codenamed, is BlackBerry's most box-shaped handset yet.

While it shares a similar shape to some of Nokia's stouter handsets, the Q30 looks like an odd peg in an increasingly elongated-phone world. It's also the first BlackBerry to have the barest of essentials for its QWERTY keyboard, which has been squished from four rows of physical keys to just three.

Beauty is only skin deep

Despite the unorthodox shape and height of this potential BlackBerry handset, Windermere might be the company's most innovative phone yet.

As we reported previously, the Q30 features a physical keyboard that's also capacitive, allowing users to use the keyboard as a touchscreen surface.

The phone also manages to find enough room to squeeze in a screen bigger than four inches with a 1440 x 1440 Full HD resolution (though the exact display dimensions are still unknown) .

Underneath the small-statured frame is a quad-core Snapdragon MSM8974 processor backed by an Adreno 330 GPU and 3GB of RAM. Additionally, the battery supposedly has a healthy 3,450mAh charge that should be good for all-day use.

All in all, these admirable specs for such an odd-looking phone, but we'll have to wait for the official announcement before we pin this item as the real Q30.

Last we heard BlackBerry saved the Q30 from the chopping block along with the Z50, though just where in limbo these two phones live is unknown.

• In other smartphone news, here's everything we know about the iPhone 6