So this week I finally got my hands on a BlackBerry Q10, the keyboard version of their new BB10 phone, and I have Thoughts.
Quick background for anyone who hasn't been following: BlackBerry (still weird to not call them RIM, honestly, I keep typo-ing it) launched the touchscreen-only Z10 back in late January, and it landed with a thud everywhere except maybe the UK. The Q10 is the one with the actual physical keyboard, the one a lot of us who never fully made peace with glass slabs have been waiting for. It's been trickling onto shelves the last week or so, and I wandered into a carrier store on my lunch break Monday and just sat there thumbing away at a demo unit for like twenty minutes while a very patient sales guy watched.
First impression: the keyboard is genuinely good. Not "good for a smartphone keyboard," just good. The keys are slightly domed, theres real travel, and BlackBerry crammed in this thing where you can start typing on the keyboard itself as a way to search or jump into apps from the home screen, which sounds gimmicky and is actually kind of great once you get used to it. My thumbs remembered muscle memory I didn't know I still had from my old Bold days. I actually said "oh" out loud in the store, which probably didn't help my case for getting a discount.
Here's my complaint though, and its a real one: the screen. 3.1 inches, square-ish aspect ratio because half the phone's face is keyboard. After two years of getting used to a 4.5-inch display on my current phone, going back felt like reading a newspaper through a mail slot. Scrolling through a webpage on the demo unit, I had to scroll about four times as much as I'm used to, and BB10's browser, while fast, doesn't do anything to make that less annoying. If you live in your email and BBM (do people still say BBM, is that still a thing people say) the keyboard trade-off is probably worth it. If you're someone who reads a lot on your phone, watches video, whatever, I don't think this is your device.
The bigger issue, and this isn't new information to anyone paying attention, is the app situation. BlackBerry World (their store, still getting used to that name too) has climbed to something like 100,000 apps, which sounds like a lot until you remember it's mostly padding, and there's still no official Instagram, no real Netflix app last I checked, nothing from a bunch of the stuff people actually open every day. The OS underneath is legitimately interesting. The gesture-based navigation, swiping up and over between apps instead of hitting a home button, is smoother than I expected, and the unified inbox (BlackBerry Hub, they call it) pulling texts, BBM, email, and social notifications into one place is the kind of thing I didn't know I wanted until I used it. But an operating system is only as good as what you can actually do with it, and right now that's the whole ballgame for BlackBerry.
Pricing at the carrier was $199.99 with a two-year agreement, $599 if you want it unlocked and contract-free, which felt steep for a phone that's going to spend the next year getting compared unfavorably to whatever Samsung and Apple ship next. I didn't buy one. I probably won't. But I'll admit I left that store more impressed than I walked in expecting to be, and if you'd told me 2011-me that BlackBerry would eventually make me say "huh, that's actually clever" about anything, I'd have laughed you out of the room.
Anyway. If you've got a soft spot for physical keyboards and you don't live and die by having every app under the sun, it might be worth a look before you write the company off entirely. Everyone else already has.