Could this be BlackBerry’s rumoured Android smartphone codenamed Venice

But all hope is not lost, as the company is dropping its own operating system for one device, and adopting our own Android OS.

The line of Blackberry 10 devices haven’t performed particularly well against the iPhone and a number of Android smartphones.

Today, popular source of leaks, Evan Blass has managed to reveal what could well be the first press image of the upcoming BlackBerry Venice smartphone.

That’s not all the gossip Blass had for us, as he also tweeted that the BlackBerry Venice, the firm’s mooted Android-powered slider phone, will also run Android and make its debut on U.S. network AT&T.

The image is cut off, so it’s not possible to really tell what the device looks like.

Of course we can not see the full phone in the image. Blackberry’s CEO, John Chen spoke with Bloomberg not too long ago, basically saying never say never when it comes to Android on BlackBerry. The slider is likely to combine a touch screen with a physical keyboard, similar to BlackBerry’s Passport phone.

Unfortunately, there’s no BlackBerry-related service or app showing on the phone’s display, so we must assume they have been left out from the picture or they might be listed on the second page of the drawer.

The BlackBerry Venice smartphone is said to sport a 5.4-inch QHD display with a 1440 x 2560 pixel resolution. The handset will be powered by a 1.8GHz Hexa-core CPU, and will come with an 18-megapixel back camera. In the front, the smartphone will pack another 5-megapixel camera for selfies. And more recently, BlackBerry integrated Amazon’s Appstore on its phones; those apps are actually Android-compatible as well.