Never count out BlackBerry – the beleaguered company isn’t giving up on its dreams of a big comeback and has launched its latest mid-range touchscreen smartphone, the BlackBerry Leap, into the South African market.

Martin Fick, BlackBerry South Africa’s senior product manager told a crowd of journalists at Vodaworld this afternoon that the phone is available now through Vodacom, with the other network operators adding it to their phone lineups in the coming weeks.

Fick said the new phone is aimed at what he called “power professionals”, people who value things like all-day battery life, productivity options and the ability to keep work and personal data separate.

The Leap comes with protection against malware, a battery that can last up to 25 hours even with heavy use and built-in encryption, all features that suit the modern enterprise environment. BlackBerry has also developed several accessories, like a cradle for easy charging and the Flex Shell case that doubles as a kickstand, both of which are available through Vodacom.

The phone’s hardware is decidedly middle-of-the-road, but keeps BB10 flowing smoothly with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor and 2GB of RAM. It also comes with 16GB of storage that is expandable by up to 256GB via a microSD card, a 720p screen and LTE and HSPA radios.

While Fick didn’t give pricing information, we did some digging and found out that the Leap is available on prepaid for R3 999 and on contract starting at R259 per month via Vodacom’s website.

Sound good? Grab one from Vodacom, or wait for your preferred provider to carry it.