BlackBerry parties like it’s 2012 with the all-touch Leap

With an edge-to-edge touchscreen display and an app that amalgamates your social feeds, the BlackBerry Leap brings features other manufacturers have been offering for years to the table.

BlackBerry finally conceded that this whole touchscreen thing was taking off with the BlackBerry Z10 and, despite saying it was going to focus on keyboard-toting telephones, has gone all-touch once again. The BlackBerry Leap has a 5-inch HD edge-to-edge display and BlackBerry reckons you can get up to 25 hours of heavy use out of the thing on a single charge – we’ll believe that when we see it.

The Leap is supposed to be an affordable handset aimed at “career builders”. Basically what that means is that the company has included a bunch of security features so you can use the handset for work and play – there’s support for encryption, malware protection and back up, wipe and restore facilities.

Running BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, BlackBerry is also excited to inform you that it comes with a new feature named Blend, which brings your social feeds, messages, email and newsfeeds together and works across platforms so you can run it on an iPad, desktop and your BlackBerry Leap if you so desire.

Other specs to note are the 720p resolution, 8MP camera and the welcome addition of a microSD slot to expand the 16GB of internal memory. Not exactly superphone specs to have the HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S6 quaking in their boots, but if the phone comes with the “affordable” price tag that BlackBerry is promising, it could still prove decent value.