New BlackBerry Classic: a blast from the past or a breath of fresh air?
Smartphone users want and prefer touchscreens. Or do they? BlackBerry Ltd. seems to think they don’t. Its latest smartphone, the BlackBerry Classic, sports a physical QWERTY keyboard. The new phone has a 3.5-inch 720-by-720 resolution display on top with a physical keyboard at the bottom.
Those paying attention will recall that the BlackBerry Q10 also featured a physical keyboard, but with the Classic, BlackBerry is bringing back features like the optical trackpad and the “tool belt” of physical buttons for functions like the back button, menu and making and ending phone calls. This is reminiscent of the BlackBerry Bold of old. See it in action in the video at the end of the article.
The Classic runs the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which is built around gestures and unified communications in the BlackBerry Hub and gets enterprise and productivity apps from BlackBerry World and games and apps geared toward entertainment from the Amazon Appstore.
BlackBerry is positioning the Classic as an upgrade to the Bold and it does in fact offer improvements in certain areas. The Classic has a larger screen, faster Web browser and improved battery life of up to 22 hours with mixed usage. It boasts a voice-activated virtual assistant, built-in video calling via BBM and a modicum of interoperability through BlackBerry Blend which makes some apps accessible on PCs and tablets.
Under the hood there is a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage expandable via a MicroSD card slot.
BlackBerry is clearly playing to business users, its most loyal customer base. Stalwart BlackBerry fans prefer the physical keyboard over a touchscreen and BlackBerry itself is touting security and battery life above all else.
The BlackBerry Classic appears to be what BlackBerry has always been –a perfect phone for business use.
An unlocked BlackBerry Classic will set consumers back $499, but will only work on AT&T and T-Mobile. BlackBerry says Carrier specific devices will only be available at a later date.
Image via BlackBerry
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