BlackBerry Q10

For BB users who swear by physical QWERTY keypad, Q10 is a winner

After all the speculations about what BlackBerry will do next and what its future will be, it came back with a bang with the Z10 earlier in the year, but hard core BlackBerry users missed the physical keyboard. The new Q10 has taken care of that. It has a touchscreen, a keyboard, and a new operating system all packed in a smart handset.

The Q10 is what BlackBerry likes to call ‘the best way to type’, so if you are a QWERTY person like me, then you will love the Q10. Its intelligent word prediction and dictionary engine allow you to use the keyboard more efficiently and faster.

The Q10 is available in both black and white colours. The keyboard design speaks of precision engineering, while the rounded edges retain the familiar BlackBerry look and feel. But there are no end/reject call and answer call keys, all these functions are done via the touchscreen. All the apps that are available on the Z10 will work with the Q10, thanks to a wonderful software development kit from BlackBerry.

The Q10’s 3.1 inch LCD screen offers a resolution of 720 X 720 pixels, which makes the screen look lovely when it comes to your applications and other uses, but when it comes to watching videos, the screen is limiting. The Q10 also ships with BlackBerry 10.1 operating system, which quickens a few things, say, if you want to tweet you can just type ‘tweet’ and the message, and it goes to Twitter; to email, just type ‘email person@email.id’ and it opens up mail.

The Q10 is fitted with three microphones that allows for active noise cancellation, and in my tests at a noisy airport, my calls were received loud and clear without any noise.

The Q10 features an 8 megapixel rear camera and a front 2 megapixel camera. The cameras respond slightly faster than the OS10 and give some sharp images, but they still can’t beat my iPhone’s camera.

The black Q10 has a back cover with weaved carbon fibre matte finish, which gives each handset a slightly different look from one another, but that is not with the white. Otherwise, between the black handsets and the white ones everything else is the same.

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