The BlackBerry Q10 might not have been the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone to reach the market, but with its classic QWERTY keyboard it’s arguably the first proper new BlackBerry. Blending the new OS with both a touchscreen and the sort of physical text-entry functionality that BlackBerry addicts have been swearing by for years, the Q10 promises to bridge the gap between the Brave New World of touch and those for whom stabbing out an email reply wouldn’t be complete without the crackle of tiny keys. Does that make it the missing link in smartphones, or just a bygone of an era that ought to be forgotten? Read on for our full review.
Hardware
The Q10 may be outwardly very different from the first BlackBerry 10 device, the all-touch Z10, but internally it’s pretty much the same device. The 1.5GHz dualcore Snapdragon S4 Plus processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, are all identical, along with the microSD card slot, 8-megapixel rear camera, and 2-megapixel front camera. The Q10 also has WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and NFC, along with a microHDMI port (which will need an adapter, not included, to plug into a regular HDMI input) alongside a microUSB port.
The key difference is obvious, however. Where the Z10 has a 4.2-inch 1280 x 768 display, the Q10 shrinks that down to 3.1-inches and 720 x 720 resolution; it also uses an AMOLED panel, rather than the LCD of the Z10. Using a smaller screen leaves room for the Q10′s four row keyboard – more on which in the next section – that spans the entire width of the phone.
Overall, it’s a broad but stubby device, at 2.62-inches across filing your palm more than the 2.58-inch Z10, but shorter at 4.7-inches. Accommodating a physical keyboard does make for a thicker phone, however, at 0.4-inches, and a slightly heavier one, at 4.9oz. The weight is nicely spread, however, meaning it doesn’t feel top-heavy when you’re typing, and it’s easy to shift your fingers between the QWERTY and the touchscreen.
QWERTY Keyboard
Keyboards have been BlackBerry’s bread & butter for years, and have arguably kept the company afloat despite rival platforms steadily eclipsing BlackBerry 7. As you might expect, BlackBerry doesn’t mess with the formula too much on the Q10, the only real difference being the regimented layout that lacks the bow of previous models.
Curved or not, it’s a great keyboard to type on. One-handed, you can just cradle the Q10 with your middle and ring fingers and punch at it with your thumb; again, the excellent weight balance left us with no concerns the phone would tip out of our hand as we did so. Spare two hands and it’s even better, the Bold-style beveling to the key caps neatly cupping your thumbs and helping keep accuracy high. Altogether it’s a sturdy little thing, and we quickly got into the habit of punching replies and tweets on it.
The question is, of course, whether it’s better than the on-screen keyboard of the Z10. BlackBerry 10 does some interesting things with auto-prediction, notably floating the suggested words over the likely next letter and allowing you to select them with a simply flick of your fingertip, and it’s a system we found worked very well. Practically speaking, after getting accustomed to the Z10′s touch system, we were able to hit the same rate of text-entry as we could on the Q10, which suggests that, for the mainstream at least, having the flexibility of a bigger display may be more beneficial.
Software and Usability
BlackBerry 10 is a considerable improvement on the versions that came before it, combining elements of Android, Windows Phone, and iOS with the Canadian company’s own twists. We covered it comprehensively back in our Z10 review, which we’d recommend reading first. At its core are a new series of gestures which are used to navigate without a dedicated Home button, among other things. So, a swipe up from the bottom of the screen takes you back to the homescreen, while pulling your finger partway up – what BlackBerry calls the “Peek” gesture – pulls in first a column of notification icons, and then hops into the unified inbox.
It works well on the touch-exclusive Z10, but the layout of the Q10 can leave the gesture system feeling touch & go at times. The most common is the swipe-up with your thumb, but the proximity of the bottom of the touchscreen with the top keyboard row leaves little room to start your finger off in the right place. All too often we ended up tapping options or scrolling through lists rather than “Peeking”, with the Q10 assuming we were swiping the display rather than gesturing.
Out of the box, the Q10 runs BlackBerry 10.1, a dot-one update on what the Z10 is using. The changes are minor, though side-by-side the Q10 feels a little more immediate than the occasionally laggardly all-touch phone. Biggest difference – and the one which perhaps takes best advantage of the hardware ‘board – is universal search actions, which allows you to trigger tasks like new messages, reminders, tweets, and more by typing straight into the search box.
Many smartphones seldom get asked to make more than the odd voice call, but BlackBerry knows its audience demands solid voice quality and enough volume to serve impromptu speakerphone use. We had no problems with dropped calls, testing on Vodafone’s 3G network, and the positioning of the speaker – on the bottom edge – meant that speakerphone calls came through loud and clear.
Battery life is also impressive. The Q10 uses a removable 2,100 mAh pack that’s plenty large enough given the relatively compact screen. BlackBerry has even taken advantage included some darker color schemes for BlackBerry 10 apps, to take advantage of the fact that AMOLED uses less power for dimmer parts of the display.
The upshot is a phone which will last the full day without pausing for breath. BlackBerry quotes up to 13.5hrs of 3G talk time or up to 14.8 days of 3G standby (or up to 60hrs of solid music playback); in practice, with push email turned on, and regular use of the browser, camera, multimedia playback, and other apps, we made it to the evening with juice to spare.