BlackBerry Q10 Review – Lucky Number 10

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

The new Blackberry smart phone family is now realizing its success drawn from the Blackberry 10 OS and each style serves its own distinct purpose. Where the Blackberry Z10 matches the need of the full screen compact smart phone user, the Z30 provides for the power minded larger screen fan, while the BlackBerry Q10 fills that void where the need for a physical keyboard remains. We will soon see yet another ‘style’ of smartphone with a keyboard in the Blackberry Passport and it seems that BlackBerry is drawing on the belief that affording variety to the consumer results in sucess. As much as Blackberry has a long way to go to catch the giants on the block, their recent turn in financials is a great start.

From a user’s perspective, the Q10 has just the right combination of touchscreen and physical keys to provide a great operator/smart phone experience. This results in the typical user finding more features easier to use and results in a more complete experience. As an example, just imagine the number of people still not using their smartphone cameras because ‘getting there’ is just too hard. If we make things easy, not only can more be accomplished, but new features explored. We found this first hand when exploring the BB 10 OS in our Z30 Report where those not so ‘in tune’ with IOS and Android seem to catch on the BB 10 OS way much quicker.

Positives drawn from the Q10 are highlighted by the OS, but we also found the build to be very comfortable in our hands and solid, keyboard use to be easily accomplished and the display to be very clear with a very effective touchpad. We learned that external keyboard features included keyword identification of such words as ‘email’, ‘bbm’, ‘calendar’, ‘text’, and many others, once again making this smart phone putty in the hands of a power user. The camera also has new camera features to include HDR (High Dynamic Resolution) for low light shots, and Time Shift, where a number of shots are taken during a 2 second interval, all of which can be viewed to ensure just the right picture results.

Checking pricing, we still find the BlackBerry Q10 as cheap as $79 when we attach it to a plan, but the price for the unlocked international version (without contract) is only $256US or $319CDN, depending on which Amazon you shop on. This is a great price considering what we see from other similar devices.  Being unlocked, it can work with any SIM card period; there is no need to set it up with the carrier if you have the card.  In our case, my son had a Telus SIM card and his iPhone went dead, coincidentally right when I was reviewing this Q10.  We popped it out of the iPhone, cleaned the Apple residue off, and popped it in the Q10.  It worked right away…no setup whatsoever….voice, text and data.

Check Out Blackberry Q10 Pricing at Amazon!