This Chinese Company Wants To Bring The Blackberry Back

In the realm of mobile devices, there is hardly a name that evokes a sense of nostalgia and a bittersweet "what could've been" thought as BlackBerry does. A brand that was once a staple among professionals and a tech aspiration for the rest, the Canadian company failed to adap following the revolution that came with the iPhone. The brand attempted to reinvent itself a few times in the aftermath, but it finally abandoned its mobile ambitions in 2022. Three years later, a generally unknown Chinese company named Zinwa is attempting to revive one of the last "true" BlackBerry phones by giving it a Frankenstein treatment.

Zinwa is essentially taking the classic phone and attempting to install Android on it while also retrofitting it with modern hardware. These limited units of reengineered BlackBerry Q20 phones will be sold under the name Zinwa Q25 Pro. Zinwa is, expectedly, trying to fill that performance gap and the resource demands of modern-age Android apps by giving a brain transplant to the discontinued phone. 

Now, you can get your hands on this unique phone two ways. First, you can buy the whole device at $420 a pop. Alternatively, if you already have a BlackBerry Classic, aka Q20, eating dust in a drawer, you can buy Zinwa's Q25 Pro set that costs $320. The bundle includes a new motherboard with faster silicon, a better camera module, and a battery pack. Zinwa says it will ship the kit in September this year.

Now, it's pretty obvious that to run Android apps of the modern age in 2025, the BlackBerry Classic would require an internal rework. The need for suitable upgrades was also felt a decade ago when the phone first hit the market. The device was originally equipped with an older processor. "The chips and processors used in the Classic aren't going to win any awards for speed or performance," The Guardian found.

Back then, the innards — which included a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and 2GB of RAM — were hardly a blistering combination. Another real problem was the taxing software situation. The phone ran the company's proprietary BlackBerry 10 operating system. However, it did offer access to a selection of Android apps via the Amazon App Store. Due to the hardware limitations, those Android apps struggled on the BlackBerry Classic. "But when you launch an Android app, you'll usually find yourself waiting a shockingly long time," noted The Verge.

The Zinwa Q25 Pro swaps the original motherboard with a new one with MediaTek's octa-core Helio G99 processor based on the 6nm process. Aside from more (and faster) cores, this silicon also brings an upgraded graphics engine. For app multi-tasking needs, the RAM has been upgraded to a faster 12GB LPDDR4x module, while the storage has also been bumped up to 256GB. The camera sensors have also been replaced, and a new 3,000mAh battery will keep the lights on. The rear camera is now a 50-megapixel unit, while the front has been upgraded to an 8-megapixel sensor. On the connectivity front, the company promises all-band 4G LTE and VoLTE support, but no 5G compatibility.

In a video shared on YouTube, the Zinwa has shown a reworked unit of the BlackBerry Classic with the new motherboard. The phone can be seen booting Android and running apps such as Discord. Even the touch-sensitive trackpad appears to be functional on a UI based on Android 14. Overall, it seems the Zinwa Q25 Pro is a fairly capable modern rebirth of the BlackBerry Classic. The internal specifications are not top-tier by any stretch of the imagination, but for an asking price of $420, this seems to be a fairly capable phone with arguably the best physical keyboard you will find on a phone and a one-of-a-kind touchpad for navigation, even though the phone comes with a touch-sensitive screen.

Now, before you splurge on the phone, keep a few things in mind. This is a third-party retrofit, which means no official support. And if you end up doing hardware damage, there is a high chance that you will find replacement parts out there. Moreover, it's running Android 14, and Zinwa isn't making any promises regarding a software update. It's a two-generation-old software, which is going to show app compatibility issues sooner or later, while Android 16 is already out. If you really want to discover the charm of a physical keyboard, you might want to check out the Clicks physical keyboard for Android devices. Alternatively, you can splurge on the Unihertz Titan 2, a 5G-ready Android phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, bigger display, larger battery, more powerful cameras, and Android 15 running the show on the software side – for just $400 a pop.