BlackBerry Q10, which was announced by BlackBerry along with BlackBerry Z10 on January 30th, will not be launched in March. Instead it will be launched late May this year.
The BlackBerry Z10, which is an all touchscreen smartphone, will arrive in retail stores only by end of this month or latest by mid-March. The BlackBerry Q10, which brings touchscreen and the QWERTY keyboard in one package, will hit the markets 8 to 10 weeks after the launch of the Z10, Thorsten Heins, the chief executive officer of Blackberry, has said.
This means that Blackberry Q10 can be expected only by mid May or early June, which is too much time in the fast moving handset market. However Blackberry CEO has added that they are trying to bring the phones as soon as they can.
The BlackBerry 10 OS bearing BlackBerry Q10 smartphone features a physical Qwerty keyboard along with a touchscreen display. It has a 3.1-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen display that packs 720×720 pixel Resolution natively. Besides offering a 328 pixels per inch pixel density, the screen also supports multi-touch and under it rests a four row Qwerty keyboard. This keyboard is exactly like the on-screen keyboard in the BlackBerry Z10. On top of the key rows rests a silver strip that makes the keyboard look like guitar’s fret board.
The BlackBerry Q10 is about 10.3 mm thick and weighs 139 grams. This smartphone has a dual-core 1.5 GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 mobile Processor inside paired with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB on-board storage. There is also a hot swappable Memory card slot that can accommodate up to 32 GB micro SD card.
The rear part of BlackBerry Q10 flaunts the same 8 Megapixel auto focus camera and LED flash as the one used in BlackBerry Z10. With capability to record full 1080p HD videos, the Q10’s camera promises high quality imaging. There is a 2 megapixel camera in the front capable of 720p HD video recording and 3X digital zoom.
BlackBerry Q10 will support quad-band GSM networks and packs the same Dual-Band WiFi network (2.4 Ghz and 5 GHz) along with Bluetooth 4.0. BlackBerry has packed sensors such as accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, Compass and also the GPS module with A-GPS support. BlackBerry has packed 1800 mAh battery to offer talk time of 10 hours over 3G networks.
Both BlackBerry smartphones pack BlackBerry Maps powered by TomTom. The BlackBerry 10 OS has been optimised to support variety of audio and video formats. By default, both smartphones support the DivX and XviD video formats along with the WAV and FLAC lossless audio formats.
While the pricing has not been announced yet, but it is expected to be priced above Rs 35,000 in the Indian market whenever it arrives.