After what seems like a decade or so of speculation, BlackBerry CEO John S. Chen let slip the Canadian smartphone maker's plans for an Android handset. The eagerly anticipated bombshell dropped during the company's quarterly earnings report, which was an otherwise customarily bleak affair, highlighting a $66 million dollar loss among other worst-than-anticipated news.

The potential bright spot has been deemed the BlackBerry Priv -- a pithy take on privacy, long one of the company's key focuses in an overrun smartphone market.

Without much in the way of specificity, Chen highlighted some of the device's key traits. "Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform," he said on the call.

BlackBerry has long looked toward its proprietary operating system as a way of differentiating itself from the deluge of Android devices, but aside from the company's perennially beloved BBM messaging service, the software focus has seen the company relevance erode in the smartphone space.

The Priv will no doubt be an attempt to appeal to the sea of Android users while offering the business-minded security focus that long made BlackBerry a standard in the corporate world.

Source: The New York Times