BlackBerry Q10 Review

BlackBerry attempted to make a comeback in the smartphone market with a new line of BB10 devices. The Q10 was one of their flagship models featuring the same, small QWERTY keyboard which used to be popular five years ago.

Although from first glance, the Q10 looks remarkably similar to previous BlackBerry devices, it does include a touchscreen. Outside of the touchscreen addition, the Q10 harkens back to the ever-popular BlackBerry Bold in many ways, so fans of that device will likely be happy with this one.

Anyone that has become used to using a large touchscreen for browsing the Internet, typing, and playing games will have a hard time understanding the Q10 and its small 720 x 720 pixel screen.

Playing games on the Q10 is not an easy task and people wanting to play things like Angry Birds, Candy Crush, etc should stay clear of the phone. Instead, BlackBerry is trying to target primarily text, email, and social network addicts.

The issue with targeting people that type a lot, is that the Q10’s small keyboard is not exactly easy to use for most people with average or larger hands.

In terms of hardware however, the BlackBerry Q10 is actually impressive. It comes with a 1.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of expandable microSD storage. These specs are on-par with much larger and more intensive devices, so the Q10 runs very smooth and is snappy when opening applications.

For most people, the area where the Q10 lacks the most is screen size. A 3.1-inch screen simply does not cut it in today’s market for the average smartphone user, nor does a physical keyboard make a lot of sense in 2013.

Battery wise, the Q10 is great. It requires less power to run than its Z10 cousin, but includes a larger 2100 mAH battery. With this size battery, the Q10 easily lasts all day and with regular usage, it can round out the day with around 15-20% of battery life left.

When using the Q10, be prepared to scroll like you never have before. The smaller screen size results in only a few tweets showing up at a time in Twitter, and likewise for emails and Facebook posts. So, when trying to quickly browse Twitter and see what your friends are up to, constantly scrolling can become tedious.

The actual BB10 operating system is great and its implementation is clean. Being able to open up all of your messages with just one swipe is incredibly convenient and time saving.

For people that can deal with the smaller keyboard, it is designed in a comfortable way. However, for myself and many others, it is too small to comfortably use for a long period of time.

Rating: 7.5/10