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Are keyboard phones still relevant? For BlackBerry, a company that practically invented the QWERTY phone, the answer could prove pivotal to its future. You can see how much BlackBerry understands that when you pick up the Q10, the first phone with a physical keyboard to run BlackBerry 10.
Put simply, the BlackBerry Q10 is the best keyboard phone you can buy today
Put simply, the BlackBerry Q10 is the best keyboard phone you can buy today. It's a gorgeous piece of hardware with state-of-the-art smartphone technology, which the keyboard interacts with in some very useful ways. QWERTY keyboard fans will really enjoy the Q10 — even more since it ships with BlackBerry 10.1, the latest software.
Others, however, won't see much value in it. After using the BlackBerry Q10, it's clearer than ever to me why BlackBerry didn't debut its new operating system with its signature form factor, instead opting to have the touchscreen Z10 carry the banner of BlackBerry 10. For anyone used to the full-screen experience of the iPhone or most Android flagships, you'll question why valuable screen space is being taken up by... ugh... buttons.
You'll also be slowed down. After years of typing on touchscreens, I'm at the point where my fingers bounce effortlessly from onscreen key to onscreen key. The Q10, however, had me pausing ever-so-slightly after every key press to... I don't know why. Involuntarily thinking about the tactile response? Whatever the reason, I was a typing tortoise on the Q10.
Still, I acknowledge there's a significant number of people — probably still using BlackBerrys — who feel the opposite about keyboard phones, and the Q10 is meant for them. It's also meant to represent consistency at BlackBerry. Yes, the company has changed its name; yes, it's embraced touchscreens; yes, the entire leadership is different, but it still makes a phone that looks and feels... well, like a BlackBerry.
Design Type
Check that. The Q10 looks like a classic BlackBerry, but it's far more pleasurable to use. Older QWERTY BlackBerry phones were great examples of industrial design but became a frustrating experience when you tried to use them to run apps, surf the web or play a casual game — basically almost anything a modern smartphone does. The Q10 is beautiful, but it's got the brains to back up its good looks.
At 4.9 ounces, the phone is lighter than you expect
At 4.9 ounces, the phone is lighter than you expect. When you pick it up, it feels almost warm — not because the processor is heating things up (a reality with most phones these days), but because of the glass-weave backside and the PVD-treated stainless steel edge. The design feels more "high end" than plastic and less cold than metal or glass, not to mention it bestows a good grip.
The Q10's square-shaped screen measures 3.1 inches diagonal with 720 x 720 resolution, giving it a pixel density of 328 pixels per inch (ppi), or roughly the same as the iPhone 5. The screen is an AMOLED display, BlackBerry's first, though I didn't find its brightness or contrast to be that impressive. It's certainly a capable screen, but an iPhone 4S is more eye-popping at maximum brightness. So was the Z10.
On the inside, the Q10 packs a dual-core 1.5GHz processor; 2GB of RAM; 16GB of storage (which you can augment with a microSD card); radios for dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and near-field communication; and 4G LTE connectivity — basically, the exact same capabilities as the Z10. It's good to see BlackBerry didn't scrimp... this phone is as much a flagship as its full-screen brother.
The Keyboard Experience
BlackBerry has a lot of experience making keyboard phones, and it shows in the Q10. I thought the last QWERTY phone the company made, the Bold 9900, had an superbly designed keyboard, but the Q10 takes it to a new level. The keys are slightly larger, and the curve is gone.
The steel trim between the rows of keys is slightly thicker, giving your thumbs a little more room to move, making accidental key presses less likely. The trim also extends beyond over the edges — a design choice BlackBerry borrowed from high-end furniture — which has the effect of make the keyboard feel a bit more "open" than previous generations.
With a physical keyboard, you lose one of the marquee features of BlackBerry 10, its predictive typing, where you swipe up from onscreen keys to type whole words. I'm fine with losing it — I was never a huge fan of the trick anyway, which requires a lot of practice to really use effectively.
In place of swiping, Q10 users get a bonus feature: keyboard shortcuts
In place of swiping, Q10 users get a bonus feature: keyboard shortcuts. Suddenly have the urge to tweet something? Pull out your Q10 and just start typing the word "tweet," followed by whatever wisdom suddenly struck you. Hit "post" and your message goes right to Twitter without ever needing to launch the app.
Twitter isn't alone in getting the shortcut treatment. You can type "fb" for a Facebook status update, "li" for LinkedIn, "text" for SMS, and a few others. Being able to call up specific app functions from the homescreen is an überconvenient tool, and BlackBerry says it's opening up the ability to developers. Evernote, theoretically, could use "en" to create a new note. Handy.
Of course, within apps, there are plenty of other shortcuts (spacebar to scroll down in the Browser, for example) — pages of them, in fact. Most of these have existed for a long time, and are sure to satisfy the keyboard crowd. They take reminding and practice to use effectively, but they're great to have.
If the point of the keyboard is to speed things up, it's through shortcuts rather than actual typing — at least in my case. To measure how much the Q10's QWERTY keyboard handicapped me, I raced myself typing out "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs," twice in a row on three phones: the Q10, the large-screen HTC One and my personal iPhone 4S (the latter two in portrait mode).
Both sentences had to be typed correctly, so the test also took into account autocorrection and ease of backspacing/editing. On the Q10, it took me 43.2 seconds to get it done. I fared 38.2 seconds on the HTC One, and I positively flew on my iPhone, at 31.4 seconds.
The iPhone obviously had home-field advantage, but I didn't expect it to be so dominant. The HTC One might have fared better were it not for the way Android autocorrects, which I find unfamiliar. Still, both touchscreen phones schooled the Q10. Even with practice, I doubt I'd be a faster typist on it — typing on screens is simply less frictional, literally and figuratively.
Going to 10.1
The Q10 is the first device to run BlackBerry 10.1, which refines the experience of the mobile OS. The company says owners of the Z10 will get the update in the coming weeks.
The changes are incremental, but some of them matter a lot. You can now sync multiple Google Calendars through the Calendar app. If you have a Google Apps account, you may need to re-input your account info a few times to sync Gmail, Calendars and Contacts, but it definitely works.
One of the things I criticized BlackBerry 10 for was how different it is from other mobile OSes. Without a home button, some new users will be at sea without a tutorial. Well, now that tutorial exists. The first time you boot the device, the Q10 shows you how to gesture, where the Hub is, and things like that. It's pretty basic, but needed. Here's a sample instruction:
The camera is the same 8-megapixel model found in the Z10, complete with time-shifting goodness for eliminating those weird-face moments. With 10.1, it has a setting for capturing normal photos as well as HDR (high dynamic range) pics simultaneously; you previously had to save as one or the other.
A Q10 camera oddity: The pictures default to square aspect ratio
A Q10 camera oddity: The pictures default to square aspect ratio. That sort of makes sense, since the screen is square, although I find it an odd choice for a device whose platform — infamously — doesn't have Instagram. Of course, you can change the ratio anytime you want.
BlackBerry 10.1 also brings back the ability to get extreme in your alert customizations. Want to have a specific ringtone when your girlfriend calls? Or turn off the flashing LED for certain work colleagues? Now you can.
Finally, the "zoom in" effect when selecting text is a slightly better, more effective at targeting and easier to drag around.
Sadly, none of the refinements in BB10.1 can magically populate BlackBerry's app catalog. They're doing okay — there are 100,000 apps in BlackBerry World now — but "okay" isn't going to get them Netflix or Vine. It remains to be seen whether BlackBerry 10 will ever attract enough developer interest to really thrive, but easy porting of Android apps (which can sometimes have a less-than-optimal experience) seems to be helping a little.
Balancing Act
When I reviewed the Z10, I didn't get a chance to try BlackBerry Balance, the way BlackBerry 10 lets you create a "workspace" on the device that's separate from your personal apps and content. This time BlackBerry set me up with a test account to check out the feature.
Balance does a great job of keeping work and personal apart, although sometimes it behaves in unexpected ways. After you set up, you can unlock your workspace by sliding down from your home screen and entering a password. Once you do so, the screen's background changes and presents a different set of apps.
Any work email accounts will now be visible in the Hub. Interestingly, your personal accounts are still there, too, just with your work emails mixed in. When the workspace is locked, you'll still get alerts about incoming mail, but they won't be visible until you enter your password.
I found a couple of quirks about how Balance works a little weird. Balance lets you keep your workspace unlocked while still in "personal" mode, so you can read emails without switching over entirely. However, that leads to odd things happening: screen captures I was taking in this mode were saved to the workspace side, so they weren't visible in the Pictures folder.
Despite some minor confusion, Balance makes a lot of sense. I'd like to see some of the workspace security applied to the personal side of things — it would be nice to be able to exclude certain personal Hub accounts from the work side — but for the most part it's well thought out.
Final Keystrokes
Battery life is excellent. It's not nearly as good as BlackBerry's old Curve models, which were amazing at sipping power, but the smaller screen, along with some good development choices (the background of the Calendar app is black, for example), keep the Q10 running beyond a full day of normal use.
The Q10 BlackBerry lent us was for AT&T's network, and call quality was fine. Voices didn't sound as clear as on, say, the HTC One on Sprint, but the difference was slight. Until HD Voice becomes more common, call quality on most phones will likely remain unremarkable. As ironic as it sounds, you don't buy a phone today for how well it makes calls.
You do buy a phone because of the platform and overall power, and on that score the Q10 has all the trappings of a state-of-the-art smartphone. It has a robust processor and can connect to fast networks, it has an excellent camera, and it's a marvelous piece of design.
And then there's that keyboard. I began reviewing the Q10 hoping I'd conclude that, powered by BlackBerry 10 software, it's what the classic BlackBerry phone was always meant to be. But now that I've used it, the presence of the QWERTY keyboard feels like a redundant throwback than an signature feature.
That's not to say there isn't a sizable, if shrinking audience for this phone
That's not to say there isn't a sizable, if shrinking audience for this phone, or that BlackBerry hasn't done a great job in modernizing the keyboard phone in a compact form factor. If QWERTY phones are your bag, the Q10 will do you much better than, say, the Droid 4.
So the Q10 scores a victory, but it's a pyrrhic one. As good as many of the features of the Q10 are, it's not a phone I could recommend to anyone but the diehard few who were already lining up for it. BlackBerry has done the best it can to stay true to its QWERTY past in the Q10, but in today's world, where all displays are rapidly evolving into touchscreens, the physical keyboard is really just a waste of space.
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