After some years of being the next in line for mobile phones, this time it’s going to be the a coming back statement for Blackberry. Attempting to take back what has been taken from them during the times that they were leading when it comes to mobile technology and mobile apps. The Android and the iOS has been prominently dominating the mobile world leaving all the other competitors left behind such as Windows, Blackberry, Nokia and etc.
Blackberry has been known to be so independent when it comes to developing their own technology. Produced and Marketed by Research in Motion Limited (RIM), Blackberry Z10 is their newest high end product, and hopefully the one that should bring the pride back to it’s brand. In this review, we’ll try to tackle some of the factors that is being considered by someone when purchasing a phone or planning to switch to a new one. We’ll discuss Z10’s Design, Hardware, Software and Camera. And let’s start of with the Design.
The Design.
The Overall Look of the Blackberry Z10 is somehow very appealing. You can actually consider this phone as one of the best looking phone in the market. Weighing at about 4.83oz and dimensions of 5.12 x 2.58 x 0.35 inches in height, width and thickness, respectively. Making it very lightweight when you hold it with your hands. It has a nice back rubber covering which would help you to minimize slipping issues. A micro USB and micro HDMI port can be found on the left side of the phone, and the volume control found on the right, with a dedicated voice control button found in between the volume control buttons. A 3.5mm jack for headphones and the power button can be found on the top, and the speaker port found at the bottom.
The Hardware.
The Blackberry Z10 has a display of 768 x 1280 pixels resolution, 4.2 inches and 355 ppi (pixel per inch) pixel density. The display is considerably nice but not as bright as compared to Apple’s iPhone 5 and some other smart phones out in the market that has greater number of ppi’s. But overall, the display is rich and sharp enough for those who are not really fancy about graphical displays. It has a capacitive touch screen with 16M colors. Z10 is powered by a Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait Processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, Bluetooth v4.0 and LTE capability. With these specs, it actually gets the same performance rate as with iPhone 5, or when compared with other Quad core devices such as Nexus 4, it’s kind of in the middle of the benchmark. When it comes to battery life it has a Li-Ion 1800 mAh battery capacity which could make it last for about 8-9 hours talk time, 8-9 hours of video playback, 6-7 hours web browsing, and standby time varies depending on the number of applications running.
The Camera.
The main camera of the Blackberry Z10 features an 8mp rear facing camera capable of recording 1080p HD videos and a 2mp front facing camera capable of recording 720p video. The Z10 camera is just OK when it comes to recording videos and capturing images. It wasn’t able to outperform some of its competitor smartphones. The good thing about Z10’s camera is the software that comes along with it. It has the feature that allows you change different scenes with your pictures or your video. It also allows you to take a short video clip where you can capture a picture within that clip, time shifting the video to find the best shot, or select a face if somebody blinks from the video then rewind or forward the video to get the picture desired to be used and set as one picture and have the best picture that you can get. It also has an editing software which comes along pre-installed with it.
The Software.
One of the Key feature of a smartphone is the OS that it has. The Blackberry Z10 is one of the first device that will run with Blackberry 10 OS. It supports Flash which enables it to access contents requiring Flash. Screen Sharing is also one of its cutting edge feature. It allows users to share whatever they want to share that they have on their screen like pictures or documents then share it with the person their talking to, which can be very useful for businesses. The Z10 has access to all the applications found in Blackberry world, though it doesn’t really have quite a number of exclusive apps, Making it a little behind with Google play store. Z10 has a cool version of virtual keyboard, it has very unique predictive text which will hover on top of some letters and you just need to swipe them up to your text box screen making it easier and faster to send text messages once you’ve learned and get used to using it. And of course, the messaging system is still at its best. Blackberry Messenger is still on top of the list with some added features for you to enjoy especially to those who are Blackberry fans. BlackBerry Hub and peek lets you have an easy access to all your social apps and really a convenient feature if you are a heavy communicator.
As far as performance is concern, Blackberry OS is doing quite a good job versus other smartphone’s OS and I must say, it could even possibly get the number 3 spot in ranking for mobile smartphones. Blackberry Z10 could be the phone for those of you who left Blackberry and switched to Android or iOS, or for those who are still using old versions of Blackberry and are planning to upgrade their phones, the Blackberry Z10 is definitely a good choice and it won’t let you down.