NEC Terrain leak shows QWERTY smartphone headed for AT&T

The ever-faithful @evleaks has dropped a new image, this time of a cell phone that harkens back to days-gone-by when cell phones had scrunched up keyboards in a candy-bar design. The NEC Terrain is said to be headed for AT&T and has a design that is distinctly old-school Blackberry, something that might appeal to some users but is mostly aged.

Even if you can get past the design, there doesn't seem to be much of anything else that immediately catches attention, although to be fair not much has been said about the device. There's what appears to be a 3.5-inch display, give or take a bit, which could probably be a full 4-inches if it wasn't for the giant AT&T logo at the bottom of the panel. The keyboard is your standard QWERTY offering, and looks small enough to jam multiple buttons at once.

Although it wasn't mentioned, by the looks of things in the image, this NEC handset runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich or higher. Given the product-shot style of the image, we'll probably be seeing this device in an announcement in the near future. There's no word on the kind of hardware its running, nor when we can expect to see it on shelves and how much it will cost. The only tidbit given was that it'll be offered through AT&T.

Of course, Eric Schmidt of all people is a Blackberry user, and the sum total of his reason is because he likes the keyboard. If one of Google's biggest names is still rocking a Blackberry in an environment likely overrun with Android devices, perhaps there is still a pocket of businessmen out there looking for an old-school Blackberry-wannabe device running the more popular Android operating system. In which case, godspeed NEC.

[via Android Community]