New Delhi: In its latest attempt to regain the customer base lost to rivals such as Samsung and Apple, BlackBerry launched its much-awaited Q10 in India early this month. While the first BlackBerry 10 OS smartphone - Z10 - was a full touch device, the Q10 comes equipped with BlackBerry's signature QWERTY keypad (along with a touchscreen) and is the company's latest offering running the BB10 OS.
When the phone was announced for India, I was curious to know its price tag - not because I was looking forward to the Twitter jokes that soon appeared on my timeline - but because I wanted to see whether the company would go wrong, again, in determining its pricing strategy. When the price was called out (Rs 44,990), my first desire was: Now, when BlackBerry has learnt how to make a phone to keep up with the competition, it's time that it also masters the art of pricing its phones right.
When a smartphone, out of the blue, comes with such a hefty price tag, you get an urge to discover what it possesses. We recently got the review unit and found the device to have a premium build quality, but does it have the potential to trump the competition and regain lost ground? Read on to know.
The BlackBerry Q10 is a high-end QWERTY device with no contender in the market, and therefore, it stands out. The phone is targeted at the traditional BlackBerry loyalists, who prefer a physical keypad over touch.
The Q10 is an improved version of its predecessors and can be called a new face of BlackBerry. The QWERTY keypad gets a facelift and looks neat. Each key on the keypad has a slender groove which makes typing easier. The keys are comfortable to press. The touch and type Q10 lets you easily navigate using swipe gestures, but I think the company should have also included navigation control buttons on the keypad. Aluminium strips separating the rows of the keypad make the keypad look a little more appealing to the eye.
The phone, with round corners, has a premium build quality, but it is visually not appealing. The review unit was white in colour, and the Q10 in black may be more attractive. I liked the aluminium band surrounding the edges as it makes the device look graceful.
I also liked the dotted patterned back and the silver-coloured Blackberry logo in the centre of the removable back panel added to the look. Design-wise, the phone looks good, but it lacks the wow factor. It does not weigh much and grips comfortably in your hand.
The Q10 features a 3.1-inch Super AMOLED touch display with a resolution of 720x720 pixels and has a pixel density of 330 ppi. The phone produces excellent colours and has a highly responsive touchscreen. Viewing angles are great. When large-screen smartphones are dominating the market today, the small screen on the Q10 is a black eye, and throttles your viewing experience as you can't enjoy videos on a tiny screen as much as you can on a larger screen. While browsing through Facebook posts, I wished the phone had a slightly bigger display. Even using WhatsApp on the phone was not a good experience. The small screen has many drawbacks.
The BlackBerry Q10 runs the fresh OS BlackBerry 10. The user interface is not intuitive, but is a great improvement over the previous OS. Even existing BlackBerry users need to learn the Blackberry 10 swipe gestures as the interface is gesture-based, meaning a user needs to navigate and control by swiping in specific directions. But it will not take long to learn the basic gestures. A quick run through the BlackBerry Q10 user guide would teach you all the gestures that you must know to operate the phone.
BB10 has a neat and clean interface and comes with revamped app icons. The phone lets you access camera directly from the lock screen. It has a screen dedicated to active frames (running apps), which makes multitasking an easier job. This screen can be easily accessed with a swipe gesture. The Blackberry Hub is another interesting feature of the new Blackberry 10 OS. The BlackBerry Hub gathers all messages and notifications that you receive from your different accounts including BBM, Text messages, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Google Talk, into one location.
Its 8 megapixel auto-focus camera captures good pictures, but considering the price tag it carries, its camera is nowhere close to the camera of other phones like the HTC One and Galaxy S4, which fall in the same price bracket. The phone lets you record video in two modes - 720p and 1080p. Also, the camera does not offer you much options to customise images. Its 2 megapixel front camera is decent for video chats.
I am still not satisfied with the Blackberry app ecosystem. The company needs to roll in more free, quality apps. The BlackBerry Q10 is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz and 2GB RAM. The device lets you multitask easily and running numerous apps at a time was a treat. The phone supports 1080p videos. I did not face any lag throughout the review period. The phone has a good battery life. A single charge gave it enough juice to be alive for approximately a day and a half. It comes packed with a 2100mAh battery.
While all phones let you view time and many will also show you the time in different time zones, but the style in which the BB10 displays it on a world map with day and night highlighted, does stand out. Reader view in the native browser is another noticeable feature. The reader view gives you a clutter-free experience removing everything from the page including design elements, ads, social media buttons, and shows only the text that you would like to read.
While the company added a host of new features to the new BlackBerry 10 OS, but one thing required to match wits with rivals is still missing - a personal assistant. While both Android and iOS have their own versions of personal assistant apps, BlackBerry still does not have that.
The phone produces reasonably clear and loud sound. But it loses out to the HTC One, which is equipped with the Beats Audio technology, and comes at a relatively low price.
The phone come with 16GB of internal storage, also also supports a microSD card up to 32GB. It also has a micro HDMI port for connection to your HDTV or projector.
While the phone has its own share of pros and cons, but what is likely to adversely affect the sales of this phone is its overly high price. And the benefits of what is considered to be its USP - the QWERTY keypad - is overestimated. While a lot of people still prefer a QWERTY keypad, which I believe has more to do with habit than with any tangible advantage that a physical keypad has over touch. I find nothing wrong with touch keyboards and find that not only I can type faster but also have to use lesser effort.
I would not recommend a spend of Rs 45K on the BlackBerry Q10 even if you could afford it. Had the phone been priced between Rs 25,000 and Rs 30,000, it could have easily been on our recommended list.
Pros
+ Excellent display
+ Fresh OS and Clean UI
+ Premium build quality
+ Expandable memory
Cons
- High price
- Decent camera, but not of acceptable quality considering the price tag
- Small screen size
- Not so great design
Rating: 3.5-1 = 2.5 (-1 for the high price)
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