The best look yet at BlackBerry's upcoming Android smartphone

Here's a phone that could make you want to switch back to BlackBerry. Over the past few months we've been hearing that BlackBerry is at work on an Android slider featuring one of its famous keyboards, and a few early renders have even leaked out. But now, it looks like actual builds of the phone are floating around, and several photos of one have surfaced online.

It's hard to say how stylish this thing will be from some leaked photos of what may well still be a prototype. But they certainly confirm that the device, which apparently goes by the codename "Venice," is real and likely close to completion. The word floating around is that the phone has a 5.4-inch Quad HD display, a Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB of RAM, and an 18MP rear camera. From the looks of it, the slider seems to be running an only lightly modified version of Android Lollipop, which is, as always, good news.

Earlier leaks of BlackBerry's Android slider came from Evan Blass (evleaks), who recently said to expect a November release date on all four major US carriers. Until then, stare in awe thinking about how wonderful it could be to use a good hardware keyboard with Android.