BlackBerry Q5: First look

After launching two high-end smartphones, BlackBerry finally launched a mid-end smartphone Q5 for Rs 24,990. Previously, BlackBerry has been criticized about the pricing of Z10 and Q10 and through Q5 it wanted to address the anger of price sensitive customers. But, I guess that will not happen.

We spent some time with BlackBerry Q5 during its launch in New Delhi and here is our first-hand account of the smartphone.

The Q5 is available at almost half the price of Q10 and it comes with the experience of BlackBerry 10 OS, minus the hardware quality, thus someone rightly termed it as the BlackBerry Q10 Mini.

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BlackBerry Q5 has a completely plastic body, which doesn’t look appealing. It doesn’t have a removable back panel but the design of the phone is such that a first time user may tempt to get the panel open. Also, the dedicated call answer and cancel buttons are missing.

In terms of functionality, the keypad has nice spacing and is easy to use. The power button also doubles up as the camera button when the camera App is used but it seemed as though the volume rocker had been loosely fitted. Here I would like to mention that most of the units displayed at the launch were demo units and the final quality of the smartphone may be better.

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The Q5’s 3.1 inch touchscreen has 720 x 720 pixel resolution; it is quite responsive as well as easy to use. The phone is powered by a 1.2 GHz dual core processor and has 8 GB internal storage that can be expanded up to 32 GB via a micro SD card.

The BlackBerry Q5 has a 5 Megapixel main camera and a 2 megapixel front camera. The picture quality of the front camera was average with a lot of noise in the dim lighting conditions where we used the phone, but output of video recording was quite good.

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Like the BlackBerry Q10, Q5 also has Type and Go function that makes typing easier. For instance, if users want to send an email to someone in the phonebook they just need to type ‘Email’ followed by the contact’s name and the device gives the option instantly.

Overall, though, the BlackBerry Q5 packs the goodness of BlackBerry 10, its hardware and body materials are a dampener. Also, the price point at which Q5 is available would not enthuse many potential buyers, and moreover, BlackBerry has not introduced a buy back scheme for Q5, which might have helped it in gaining attention of consumers to some extent.