14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for BlackBerry fans who couldn’t cope with the Canadian company’s latest “unconventional” smartphone, the Passport, as the next handset under the BlackBerry brand is going to bring back the classic QWERTY keyboard and form factor.
Dubbed BlackBerry Classic, the next not so expensive smartphone to be launched by BlackBerry this year has just leaked in several live pictures. Even though some of the phone’s specs have been rumored for quite some time now, the folks over a N4BB received confirmation on Classic’s feature.
During BlackBerry Passport’s launch event last month, the company’s CEO John Chen confirmed that the Classic would be available for purchase by the end of the year.
Unfortunately, there’s no telling exactly when we will be able to grab one, but at least we now know what to expect from the affordable (hopefully) smartphone.
First of all, as the name suggests, the smartphone brings back everything that BlackBerry users loved at their devices. The same form factor and the excellent QWERTY physical keyboard are part of the BlackBerry Classic for the first time in a long while.
But under the classic chassis, BlackBerry included more than decent specs, which are supposed to bring it on par with most of other mid-range smartphones.
First of all, we expect the Classic to ship with BlackBerry 10.3 operating system out of the box, though it’s unclear exactly what version it will run.
BlackBerry Classic could be unveiled as early as November 2014
Hardware-wise, BlackBerry Classic is likely to be armed with a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 S4 Pro processor, an Adreno 225 graphics processing unit and 2GB of RAM.
That’s quite a decent hardware configuration for a BlackBerry smartphone, so those tempted to give it a try shouldn’t be worried that the phone will be laggy.
The phone’s 3.5-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen display supports a rather unusual 720 x 720 pixels resolution, though this isn’t something that should surprise BlackBerry users. The screen only features 294ppi (pixel per inch), but for a mid-range handset this it quite normal.
BlackBerry Classic comes with 16GB of storage inside and there’s no mention of microSD card slot for memory expansion, but we suspect the Canadian company will add one.
On the back, the Classic packs an 8-megapixel photo snapper with LED flash and video recording, while in the front there’s a secondary 2-megapixel camera for video calls.
It is also worth mentioning that BlackBerry Classic has a standard QWERTY keyboard and a TrackPad that makes it easier to navigate through the menu. However, it appears that the TrackPad isn’t illuminated, so users might have some trouble in pinpointing it in darker environments.
