article

REVIEW blackberry q10

by Andrew Cunningham @ arstechnica.com

[WHAT]

1. SUMMARY-REVIEW
   
1. ] If the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone was a bold statement, a declaration that BlackBerry and its new operating system were ready to quit messing around and really compete against modern phones, the Q10 is the company's love letter to its most loyal customers.
2. ] As in the Z10, the operating system, apps, and animations are responsive and run smoothly on the hardware,
3. ] This is probably what smartphones would look like if the iPhone had been introduced but had flopped.
4. ] The keyboard you’ve been waiting for - This keyboard is designed to be thumb-friendly—the keys on the left and right sides of the keyboard are sloped slightly differently to be more comfortable to your left and right thumbs. The keys are satisfying and clicky and their backlight is nice and even. They're very firm as well. 
5. ] the Q10 supports some keyboard shortcuts. Starting to type from the home screen will automatically invoke the phone's search feature, so you can type things like "BBM Matt" or "SMS Flo" to quickly and easily begin doing those things. You can press T to go to the top of a page or document you're scrolling in, B to go to the bottom, or the spacebar to scroll down the page more gradually.
6. ] There is also a small truckload of application-specific shortcuts, the full list of which we've uploaded in PDF form for your perusal. As with any keyboard shortcuts, they take some time to feel natural, but once they do it's difficult to live without them.
7. ] Q10 comes with an alternate predictive typing mechanism, which is enabled from the settings panel. Begin typing and a selection of up to three words (or, occasionally, punctuation marks) will appear above the keyboard, and you can tap one to select it. This feature is similar to the way the stock Jelly Bean keyboard operates, among others. The phone will also offer you some suggested words as you type, making it theoretically possible to string entire sentences together without tapping the keyboard more than a few times. As in the Z10's software keyboard, the predictive typing is designed to become more accurate as time passes.
8. ] One thing the keyboard doesn't really change is BB10's reliance on its many touchscreen gestures—swipe up to return to the home screen, swipe to the right to get to the message-aggregating BlackBerry Hub, swipe to the left to get to your iOS-and-Android-like grid of application icons, and so on. You'll need the touchscreen for all of this, as well as things like text selection. The various scroll wheels and nubs used by BlackBerrys past are gone—and they're not likely to return.
9. ] We’re going to need a bigger screen - vertically, the Q10 can display about 44 percent less information, and if you're coming from almost any other smartphone you'll miss the extra space. In the Web browser and other vertically oriented apps, you've got to do a lot more scrolling to get where you're going. When using apps that work better in landscape mode, the Q10's square screen makes things look tiny and squashed, and most videos are tiny and letterboxed.
10. ] Q10 uses a removable 2,100 mAh battery, a slightly higher capacity than the 1,800 mAh battery in the Z10. That, combined with the smaller AMOLED display, gave us hope that the Q10's battery life would be better than the Z10's by a considerable margin. In general use (Web browsing, watching videos, navigating the OS, and doing some light gaming like Angry Birds) with the screen set to 50 percent brightness, however, the Q10 lasted just over eight hours. This is just about identical to the eight hours and 22 minutes we got from the Z10 in similar conditions
11. ] The Q10 is a very solid and well-built little phone, and it's one of the few options available from any smartphone ecosystem for the physical keyboard holdouts. For most buyers, though, it's going to feel like a throwback, and we don't mean that in a good way.

[WHY]  PROS

1. Excellent build quality
2. One of just a handful of modern phones with an integrated hardware keyboard—and the keyboard is pretty good
3. Screen is of good quality, unless you hate PenTile AMOLED
4. Roughly the same battery life as the Z10
5. Smooth UI performance
6. Decent camera performance

 

[WHY NOT] CONS

1. BlackBerry 10 still doesn't have many apps
2. Physical keyboard trades versatility and flexibility for accuracy
3. At $249, price is a bit high compared to other high-end and midrange phones
4. Occasional performance quirks, particularly in games
5. You'll miss those vertical pixels unless you're already doing all your work on a BlackBerry Bold or Curve

[WHERE]

1. ] FULL REVIEW - Blackberry Q10 - @arstechnica.com

[WHEN]

1. ] 2013-04-23

[EXAMPLE]

1. ] 

[HOW-TO]

1. ] 

[REFERENCE]

1. ] blackberry-10-operating-system-overview
2. ] blackberry-cheat-sheet
3. ] our smartphone guide
1. ] guidelines for choosing a smartphone platform thats right for you 

 

Details

ID: 3727

NAME: REVIEW-blackberry-q10-arstechnica

DESCRIPTION: by Andrew Cunningham @arstechnica - review summary an links to full review

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: -5

OWNER ID: 75

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