The Classic is indeed great for personal productivity and big on efficiency and optimum communication which for me makes it a winner. While I didn’t find it enjoyable as a tool for entertainment, I must say that indeed it is a renaissance of the good old BlackBerry that I am used to with some pretty modern features.
The phone represents some of the strengths of Blackberry in building impressive communication devices with emphasis on security.
The Design
The phone is dense, solid and compactly built. Unlike its predecessors, the back plate is firmly affixed to the chassis. One, therefore, cannot swap the battery or even execute a foolproof restart by simply popping off the rear cover.
The SIM and microSD card trays are on the left edge of the Blackberry Classic. You, however, might need a paperclip or office pin to pop open the tray cover to access the two slots. A pair of volume controls is on the right edge. The two keys are separated by the BlackBerry Digital Assistant launch key.
The front brings back memories of the Classic BlackBerry devices. A notification light has been strategically placed to pulse when you get emails. There’s also a 2MP fixed-focus front camera on top of a 3.5 inch 720p square screen. Below the screen is the functional toolkit belt compromising of dedicated Call, End Call, Menu and Back buttons. Then there is an optical trackpad.
The Keyboard is the highlight of the BlackBerry Classic. The physical QWERTY keyboard takes more space than the screen. It is, nonetheless, an excellent keyboard; probably the best on any smartphone available. Each key has a chamfered ridge ensuring that each press hits the desired target. Using this keyboard is no hard work at all. All the same, it does not adequately compete with the joyous experience of writing on touchscreen.
On the back is an 8MP camera and LED flash. The back plate is plain beside the BlackBerry logo. The nonslip texture is reliable and feels great in the hand.
The Display, Software and Performance
The Display
The 3.5 inch square screen is brilliant enough for use even in direct sunlight. The colors are vivid, even though this is not the most pixel-dense smartphone in the market. BlackBerry is still business-friendly even with its small screen. The display has adequate space to enable you to read and write emails and tweets without much to complain about.
The main complaint is that there is lack of adequate vertical space on the small screen. This means that your fingers will have to do lots of workouts in scrolling when reading through long articles. There is also evident aspect of ratio mismatch on most of the videos that you get to watch. The import of this is that there will almost always be an empty space surrounding a video, which I found annoying.
Watching videos on the BlackBerry is further worsened by the poor quality sound from the speakers, maybe because I am used to boom speakers, others might the classic speakers adequate. For an improved experience, you will have to plug in some headphones.
The Software
The BlackBerry 10.3.1 on the BlackBerry Classic looks and feels polished and improved much more than earlier platforms. The BlackBerry Hub is still the best part of BB10. It offers swift access to messages irrespective of the app you are running.
BlackBerry has long been known for being keen on productivity, and the Classic’s BlackBerry Blend is no exception. It is also very easy to run several background apps without an active frame. You are also bound to be impressed by BlackBerry Classic’s virtual assistant.
There is still a scarcity of apps for BlackBerry 10 which limits the BlackBerry Classic when compared to phones based on other app stores. If you ask me, I believe this might be one of the reasons behind Blackberry’s decision to launch the Venice Slider phone briefly shown at MWC 2015 on Android OS.
With all that said I still found a number of good apps that make the phone super awesome for me such Evernote, Bufferapp, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Holy Bible, Lastpass, Philips Voice Recorder, Adobe Reader, Connect to Dropbox, WeChat and off course BBM. These are some of the apps I am currently using and I think they are adequate for any serious business user out there.
Performance and Battery
The BlackBerry Classic has a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon 54 plus chip. This, paired with 2GB RAM gives it pretty impressive performance. The non-removable 2515mAh battery will effortlessly go a full day without requiring a top-up. In this, therefore, sector you will hardly have something to complain about.
Simply put, the Blackbery classic is literally a classic phone that will be around for while. So if you are big on productivity and communication then this is a must use!
