Blackberry Q10: Blackberry’s QWERTY Flagship smartphone.
Blackberry is having tough time facing onslaught of Androids and iPhones. Though,it revolutionized the world of mobile devices by bringing QWERTY Keypad, Push Emails and tons of features to make them smarter and more productive, it didn’t changed with time as the world was moving towards touchscreen devices and advanced operating systems. But, Blackberry is now trying to evolve itself which started with new BB10 OS for Blackberry Phones and launch of an all-touch flagship smartphone- Z10. Though people prefer touchscreen devices, many people are die-hard fans of its QWERTY keypad allowing one to type fast and accurately. Something, which touchscreen devices can’t offer. Therefore, to satisfy needs of such people, Blackberry have now launched Q10 allowing both touch as well as keypad inputs based on its latest OS- BB10. Read on to find more about it!
Design
The Q10 will certainly not be given any awards for its looks, but it will please the Blackberry loyalists since the company has taken cues from the design of Blackberry Bold and made some nice changes to it. Since the Q10 uses touchscreen along with keypad, so Blackberry has removed the top row of buttons including trackpad and controls.
Q10 is very handy with dimensions of 119.6 x 66.8 x 10.4 mm and a weight of 139 grams. At the front of the phone, you’ll find a display screen, which we will discuss later and a front-facing camera. Back of the phone sports a rear camera with a metallic Blackberry logo in the middle. The back cover is removable giving access to SIM slot and microSD card slot.
Its control layout is similar to the Z10. At the top, there is a power button and 3.5 mm headphone jack. The micro-USB and micro-HDMI are on the left, while a play/pause/voice control button is surrounded by volume up and down keys on the right.
Display
At the time when every other smartphone are breaking new records with their display size, Blackberry Q10’s display comes as a surprise. It’s a 3.1 inch square screen (720 x 720 pixels) equating to pixel density of 328 pixel per inches. Due to SuperAMOLED display, the screen renders crisp images and videos. Though the screen is 30 percent larger than previous Qwerty phones by Blackberry, it seems very limiting to consume videos or surfing internet or even reading emails.
KeyBoard
The USP of Q10 is undoubtedly its physical keyboard. The layout of Q10’s keyboard is similar to Blackberry Board, but keys in Q10 do away with round and curved edges. Q10’s keyboard is a straight row of keys. The keyboard allows you start typing right away- even when you’re at home screen, which will search for contacts and apps. It also allows you to enter ‘bbm’ to open Blackberry Messenger or ‘email’ to start an email.
But, the physical keyboard defeats the purpose of virtual predictive keyboard introduced in BB10. It gave the ability to flick upwards on individual letters to auto-complete words and swiping from right-to-left will delete the word. On the other hand, Q10‘s predictive mode only places a row of suggestions for the word you might be typing.
Hardware
Blackberry Q10 is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz processor accompanied by 2 GB of RAM. It also have PowerVR SGX544 graphics processor. It has an in-built storage of 16 GB, with option of expanding it up to 64 GB. On connectivity front, it has LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and GPS. It has various sensors like Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity sensor and compass. It is fueled by a Li-ion 2100 mAh battery.
Software
Q10 comes with BB10.1 OS, an OS Blackberry designed to take on hugely popular Android and iOS platforms. BB10 OS uses gesture based interface. Instead of tradition menu, one will find option by moving sideways- finding four frequently used apps, all apps, Blackberry Hub (centralized place where one will find all calls, texts, emails, BBMs, etc). Similar to Android, it features a quick toggles for turning on or off services such as Bluetooth, screen rotation, Wi-Fi, etc.
Talking about app count, this is one area where Blackberry have to work really hard. There are only 10,000 apps present in Blackberry World compared to more than 700,000 apps present on iOS and Android. While it has some good apps like Facebook, Twitter, etc., it stilllacks popular apps like Instagram and Netflix.
Camera
Q10 features a rear camera of 8 megapixels with LED flash capable of shooting videos of 1080p@30fps. The secondary camera is of 2 megapixels capable of shooting 720p videos. Due to BB10.1 OS update, Q10’s camera capture HDR (High-dynamicrange) images taking two picture of a scene- one high contrast image and other being a normal version, which is certainly a good option. Overall the camera’sperformance is good, though is just fine in low-light conditions.
Verdict
Q10’s pricing put it in to the league of smartphones like HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, and that’s where Blackberry faltered. Apart from its physical keyboard, it fails miserly other aspects of hardware specs, display, etc. in front of such smartphones. Moreover, the app support in BB10 OS needs to be more, because more than phone’s hardware, apps are capable of creating altogether a different experience for the users. If you’re keyboard fan, then you can go for Q10, else there are much better options available in the market.
About the Author:
This Article has submitted by Sanjay Kumar Negi. He is working with 91mobiles.com