When I reviewed the BlackBerry Z10 in January, I wrote that it was a surprisingly complete, elegant, attractive phone, considering that the company was on its deathbed. (The BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market was a dismal 2.9 percent, down from 85 percent a few years ago.)
The key benefits of the Z10:
- Swappable battery
- Memory-card slot for expansion
- Over 100,000 apps in its app store
- Clever word-completion system
- Ingenious BlackBerry Hub: a single in-box for everything (calls, texts, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook posts) that’s always available with a swipe in from the left side
- Separate on-screen “worlds†for work and personal use
- 80 million BlackBerry fans already
I’m still not sure that the Z10 will save BlackBerry. It’s awfully late, and its offerings aren’t so much more advanced than iPhone or Android that the masses are likely to risk betting on this dark horse.
But next month, BlackBerry will improve its odds by offering the Q10 (around $250 with contract). It’s a sister phone to the Z10, with all the same advantages. But instead of a full-height touch screen, this one has the classic BlackBerry design: half-height screen above, physical keyboard below.
That is a feature few rivals offer. Touch-screen phones with physical keyboards, especially from the most popular brands, are rare, and they’re usually not especially successful.
The Q10’s screen is 720 by 720 pixels â€" the biggest, sharpest screen ever on a keyboard phone, according to BlackBerry. The battery is bigger than the Z10’s; since the screen (the single most power-hungry component) is also smaller, that means the Q10 lasts much longer on a charge â€" 13.5 hours of talk time (compared with eight hours on the iPhone 5).
And then there’s the keyboard. Yes, that’s something BlackBerry is really good at. After so many years of fussing with typing on glass and making fidgety corrections, it really is sweet to have real keys. They’re not only useful when you’re writing; they also let you use all the beloved BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts: “T†for top of message, “R†for reply, “F†for forward, “L†for reply all, and so on.
Autocorrect is much less important when you have a real keyboard, of course. But at your option, the Q10 still displays, just above the keyboard, the three most likely completions of the word you’re typing. You tap one of these words to insert it into what you’re writing.
And man, is it smart. I wanted to type “Unfortunately, the company is not prepared to comment.†All I had to type were the letters shown here in boldface â€" six letters in total. In each case, the phone correctly predicted the next word I wanted â€" and even punctuation â€" requiring only one tap each. (That is, I typed “Un,†and the options included “Unfortunately.†I tapped that one, and then the button options included a comma. I tapped that one, and the choices included “the.†And so on.)
I’ll come right out and say it: no phone on the market offers a better combination of speed and accuracy for entering text.
As a bonus, the Q10 lets you type out shortcut commands from the home screen. “BBM Chris†lets you jump into a BlackBerry Messenger (instant message) chat with Chris. And so it goes with “Email Robin,†“tweet†(to enter a Twitter post), “txt†(to send a text message), “call 556-1000,†“Facebook†(to make a Facebook post), “li†(to say something on LinkedIn). Efficiency freaks everywhere should be rejoicing.
The Q10 comes with BlackBerry 10.1 software, an upgrade from what arrived on the Z10. (The Z10 will get this upgrade eventually.)
The enhancements are pretty minor. You can now paste a phone number into the dialing pad. You can opt to have your ActiveSync e-mail keep only the last 30 or 60 days’ worth of e-mail. And the BlackBerry Balance feature (the one that keeps your personal and corporate worlds separate) has been enhanced to let companies enforce even more restrictions on what your phone can do.
Now there’s a high-dynamic-range (HDR) mode in the camera app, which combines the brights and darks from three photos, taken with different exposures, for richer shots.
Now the big drag with a physical keyboard is, of course, that you lose half the screen space. You pay the price when you try to look at a map, a photo or, in particular, a movie. You also lose the niceties of an on-screen keyboard, like the ability to switch its keys to a different alphabet.
But there are thousands of people who use a smartphone mostly for e-mail, texts and typing â€" thousands who’ve been waiting for a physical keyboard on a modern smartphone. If the screen-space trade-off is worth it to you, and if you don’t mind betting on an underdog, you’ll find no better keyboarded phone than the BlackBerry Q10.
