14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian carrier Public Mobile, now owned by major operator TELUS, has just added the Motorola Moto G and BlackBerry Q5 affordable smartphones to its portfolio.
Existing customers can pick up any of the two devices for only 169 (€113) outright both online and via Public Mobile’s brick and mortar stores.
The suggested retail price of the Moto G and BlackBerry Q5 is $250 (€165), but they have been massively discounted by the Canadian carrier to make them more appealing to customers looking for affordable smartphones.
Obviously, they are meant for different targets, so Android and BlackBerry fans may choose their favorite device. The BlackBerry Q5 was the cheapest BlackBerry 10 OS smartphone available on the market until the Canadian company launched the Z3 in Indonesia.
The Q5 ships with BlackBerry 10.2 operating system out of the box, but users will be able to update it to 10.2.1 soon after purchase. BlackBerry Q5 is one of the low-end smartphones launched by the Canadian handset maker, so don’t expect anything impressive in terms of hardware.
BlackBerry Q5 is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 processor clocked at 1.2GHz and, surprisingly, 2GB of RAM. It also packs 8GB of internal memory, which can be further expanded up to 32GB via microSD memory card.
The Q5 comes with BlackBerry’s traditional physical QWERTY keyboard and a small 3.1-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports 720 x 720 pixels resolution.
The smartphone also packs a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus, LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording, as well as a secondary 2-megapixel HD (720p) camera.
Next in line, the Moto G is said to ship with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box, but a KitKat update is already available for download.
The Moto G is one of the most popular Motorola smartphones launched on the market in the last year possibly due to the low price and decent specs.
Speaking of which, the Moto G is equipped with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, an Adreno 305 graphics processing unit and 1GB of RAM.
The bad news is that Public Mobile only offers the 8GB model and the Moto G lacks a microSD card slot, so you will probably be left with only 5GB of storage overall.
Aside from that, the Moto G has quite decent features. It sports a 4.5-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports HD (720p) resolution, as well as dual cameras (5-megapixel main photo snapper and 1.3-megapixel secondary camera).