Review: All thumbs on deck with the BlackBerry Q10

If the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone was a bold statement, a declaration that BlackBerry and its new operating system were ready to quit messing around and really compete against modern phones, the Q10 is the company's love letter to its most loyal customers. The Z10 and its big, rectangular touchscreen look like the post-iPhone devices that we've gotten used to; the Q10, with its hardware keyboard and square screen, looks much like the BlackBerrys of a decade ago.

But the Q10 isn't some half-measure like the BlackBerry Bold or Curve, stopgap hardware running an operating system in desperate need of an overhaul. It's a proper BlackBerry 10 handset, running the same OS and applications as its taller, slimmer cousin. So what can it do that the Z10 doesn't, and vice versa? How do the physical keyboard and smaller screen change the BlackBerry 10 experience? And does the Q10 strike a satisfying balance between old and new, or does it simply feel outdated?

Body, build quality, and BlackBerry 10.1

The BlackBerry Q10.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If you're familiar with the BlackBerry Bold or BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Q10 will seem familiar. It looks like a Bold and the Z10 had a baby, with the Z10 having mostly recessive genes. The Q10 is a bit shorter and a bit thicker than most all-touchscreen phones, and its front face is split by its 3.1-inch, 720×720 touchscreen and 35-key backlit keyboard.

We'll be spending most of this review with the keyboard and screen rather than BlackBerry 10 itself, which is substantially the same as it was when we originally reviewed it, but BlackBerry 10.1 does make using the Q10 subtly different. You'll find that some UI elements that were white by default on the Z10 are now black by default, a move apparently made to conserve battery life. PIN-to-PIN messaging, which allows you to send messages to a particular BlackBerry handset, is also available in the BlackBerry Hub, and an HDR shooting mode (which we'll revisit later) has been added to the camera app. All of these changes (among others) will make it to the Z10 when its BlackBerry 10.1 update is out, but depending on when the Q10 is available they might be exclusive to it for a while.

Returning to the Q10: it's very slightly heavier than the Z10 (0.31 pounds compared to 0.30) and is shorter but also wider and thicker (0.41 inches thick, compared to 0.35 inches). The result is a phone that feels smaller than most, and most people should be able to reach the entire keyboard and most of the screen with one thumb while holding the phone one-handed.

The Q10 (top) is a bit thicker than the Z10, but shares its button and port layout. The power button and headphone jack are on the top.

Andrew Cunningham

The Q10 (top) is a bit thicker than the Z10, but shares its button and port layout. The power button and headphone jack are on the top. Andrew Cunningham

The micro USB and micro HDMI ports on the phone's left side.

Andrew Cunningham

The micro USB and micro HDMI ports on the phone's left side. Andrew Cunningham

The volume rocker and play/pause/voice control button on the right.

Andrew Cunningham

The volume rocker and play/pause/voice control button on the right. Andrew Cunningham

The micro USB and micro HDMI ports on the phone's left side. Andrew Cunningham

The volume rocker and play/pause/voice control button on the right. Andrew Cunningham

The phone's single speaker is on the bottom.

Andrew Cunningham

The rounded, smooth back of the Q10 (right) compared to the pitted, rubbery back of the Z10.

Andrew Cunningham

The back of the phone slides off to reveal the battery, SIM, and micro SD card slot.

Andrew Cunningham

Our review unit came with a case, a charger, a headset, a spare battery pack and charger, and some documentation.

Andrew Cunningham

The back of the phone is slightly rounded and uses a smooth (but still somewhat grippy) plastic or carbon fiber that slides down to reveal the battery, SIM slot, and micro SD slot. It's different from the pitted, rubbery, peel-off back of the Z10, but the effect is much the same: it's easy to grip and less likely to slide around in your hand than something made of glass (the Nexus 4) or smooth slippery plastic (most Samsung phones).

The port and button layout roughly matches that of the Z10: a power button and headphone jack are on the top of the phone, the micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports are on the left, a single (serviceable but tinny) speaker is on the bottom, and the volume rocker and play/pause/voice control button are on the right side. Overall, it's an extremely solid-feeling phone, and there's no undue flexing or creaking. It looks and feels like a premium product.

The keyboard you’ve been waiting for

The Q10's hardware keyboard is the reason you're here.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Most BlackBerry Q10 buyers will be getting the phone for its 35-key physical keyboard, which a small (if vocal) minority continue to prefer over touch-based keyboards. This keyboard is designed to be thumb-friendly—the keys on the left and right sides of the keyboard are sloped slightly differently to be more comfortable to your left and right thumbs. The keys are satisfying and clicky and their backlight is nice and even. They're very firm as well.

The keys are identical to those on phones like the Bold and the Curve, but the layout is slightly different. The rows of keys on these older phones were arranged in a downward arc, but the rows on the Q10 are straight; BlackBerry says that the "frets" between the rows have been made slightly thicker to help avoid missed key presses. I couldn't type quite as quickly on the physical keyboard as I can on a touch keyboard, but even compared to the Z10's generally excellent touch keyboard, I made fewer typing errors on the Q10.

The Z10's software keyboard actually obscures a bit more of the screen area than the Q10's, but the software keyboard can be dismissed to regain that screen space.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Accuracy isn't the only thing to consider when comparing a touch keyboard to a physical one, though; physical keyboards lack some of the versatility of BlackBerry 10's soft keyboard. Gone is the ability to quickly swipe through the standard, numerical, and symbol keyboards; gone is the handy swipe-to-complete predictive text; and gone is the ability to change characters on the keyboard if you're typing in a different language (or if you prefer a non-QWERTY layout). Some actions are the same on both keyboards (holding down a key for a second to make a capital letter, holding it down for longer to bring up a list of extended characters), but the similarities end there.

Some keyboard shortcuts are labeled in BlackBerry 10's menus.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Others can be activated when you start typing.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

To make up for some of the missing features, the Q10 supports some keyboard shortcuts. Starting to type from the home screen will automatically invoke the phone's search feature, so you can type things like "BBM Matt" or "SMS Flo" to quickly and easily begin doing those things. You can press T to go to the top of a page or document you're scrolling in, B to go to the bottom, or the spacebar to scroll down the page more gradually. There is also a small truckload of application-specific shortcuts, the full list of which we've uploaded in PDF form for your perusal. As with any keyboard shortcuts, they take some time to feel natural, but once they do it's difficult to live without them.

The Q10 comes with an alternate predictive typing mechanism, which is enabled from the settings panel. Begin typing and a selection of up to three words (or, occasionally, punctuation marks) will appear above the keyboard, and you can tap one to select it. This feature is similar to the way the stock Jelly Bean keyboard operates, among others. The phone will also offer you some suggested words as you type, making it theoretically possible to string entire sentences together without tapping the keyboard more than a few times. As in the Z10's software keyboard, the predictive typing is designed to become more accurate as time passes.

One thing the keyboard doesn't really change is BB10's reliance on its many touchscreen gestures—swipe up to return to the home screen, swipe to the right to get to the message-aggregating BlackBerry Hub, swipe to the left to get to your iOS-and-Android-like grid of application icons, and so on. You'll need the touchscreen for all of this, as well as things like text selection. The various scroll wheels and nubs used by BlackBerrys past are gone—and they're not likely to return.

We’re going to need a bigger screen

The Q10's touchscreen doesn't share much in common with the 4.2-inch panel in the BlackBerry Z10. For starters, the phone uses a PenTile AMOLED panel rather than the IPS panel of the Z10. All of the same benefits and drawbacks of PenTile apply here: most colors are more vibrant (if sometimes a little too saturated) and blacks are blacker, but the screen can take on a greenish or purplish hue if viewed from an angle. If you're looking for it, you can observe the "fuzzy text" phenomenon caused by the subpixel arrangement of PenTile-based AMOLED displays, especially in white text against a black background, but the 330 ppi density is high enough that this won't be a problem for most users.

The Q10's screen is over an inch smaller diagonally (at 3.1 inches), and it's also square rather than rectangular. Menus and buttons all over the operating system have been tweaked subtly to maximize the amount of vertical space available—the settings menus are slightly more tightly packed, for example, and many buttons that have labels on the Z10 lack them on the Q10. This is occasionally frustrating, especially when a button's graphic doesn't make it immediately obvious what it actually does.

Navigation bars on the Z10 have clearly labeled buttons.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The same, shorter navigation bar on the Q10 lacks labels.

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One change from BlackBerry 10.1: some menus and apps that were white in BlackBerry 10...

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

...are black in BlackBerry 10.1. This is supposedly being done to conserve battery life.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

For all the OS does to try and compensate for the shorter screen, there's only so much it can do—vertically, the Q10 can display about 44 percent less information, and if you're coming from almost any other smartphone you'll miss the extra space. In the Web browser and other vertically oriented apps, you've got to do a lot more scrolling to get where you're going. When using apps that work better in landscape mode, the Q10's square screen makes things look tiny and squashed, and most videos are tiny and letterboxed. Games like Angry Birds Star Wars and Need for Speed Undercover highlight this issue. Both games are playable on the Q10 and Need for Speed can even use the keyboard's buttons as controls, but both games are much smaller on the 3.1-inch screen. This is particularly problematic in Angry Birds, where many elements are difficult to discern.

Need for Speed Undercover on the Q10

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Angry Birds Star Wars on the Q10.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Need for Speed on the more expansive Z10.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Angry Birds Star Wars on the Z10.

Even if they're a bit squeezed for space, all of the platform's apps (and even sideloaded Android apps) run on the Q10—BlackBerry's efforts to get developers to code for both screen sizes appears to have paid off. Communicating between the Q10 and the Z10 also works nicely. For example, when using the platform's screen sharing feature, the Q10's screen will simply appear letterboxed on the Z10.

If you happen to be jumping straight from a Bold or a Curve to the Q10, its screen is slightly larger and slightly higher-resolution than what you're used to, and BlackBerry 10 is in every way an upgrade over the outgoing BlackBerry 7. If you fit that description, though, you're in the minority—anyone used to an all-touchscreen phone will find the screen to be cramped and ill-suited to many apps. BlackBerry 10 does what it can with the space available to it, but this is the price you pay for that keyboard.

Camera

The Q10 uses the exact same 8MP rear-facing (and 2MP front-facing) camera as the Z10, and it's capable of shooting the same pictures and video. A quick pair of outdoor shots taken with both phones confirms this. BlackBerry 10.1 also brings an HDR shooting mode to the BlackBerry 10 camera, which adds some lag but is capable of producing pictures with slightly more even lighting. This feature will be available for the Z10 as soon as its BlackBerry 10.1 update hits.

A photo from the Q10's 8MP camera.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

A substantially identical picture taken by the Z10's camera.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Q10 again, using BlackBerry 10.1's HDR feature. Notice how the previously shadowed porch is now much less dark.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Internals and performance

In addition to the camera, the Z10 and Q10 share most of the same insides: a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC with an Adreno 225 GPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage that can be expanded via the microSD card slot under the back cover. Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi are also part of the package. These specifications are roughly in line with what you could expect from a high-end phone like the Galaxy S III about a year ago, and what a midrange handset like the HTC First will give you today.

As in the Z10, the operating system, apps, and animations are responsive and run smoothly on the hardware, but we still don't have many benchmarks we can use to quantify this performance. Geekbench for BlackBerry has landed since we published the Z10 review, so we ran it on both phones for good measure.

Oddly, Geekbench shows the Q10 with a pretty consistent lead over the Z10. When I talked to sometime Ars contributor Matt Braga, he confirmed that his Q10 was turning in similar GeekBench scores. However, these scores didn't necessarily translate into quicker performance in apps—browser benchmarks run on both phones were very similar. We're inclined to blame BlackBerry 10.1 for the discrepancy; BlackBerry 10 is still a very new operating system, and there are still plenty of opportunities for performance optimization. We'll revisit this when the update hits the Z10 to see if its scores budge at all.

As for graphics performance, BlackBerry 10 still lacks tools like GLBenchmark, so we still can't get much in the way of quantified data. Subjectively, though, 3D performance can be choppier on the Q10 than the Z10. A 3D game like Need for Speed Underground that played smoothly on the Z10's 1280×768 display was intermittently (and inexplicably) laggy on the Q10. If anything, the lower-resolution screen should actually make for better graphics performance, but that apparently isn't always the case. We reached out to BlackBerry to investigate and were told that the app simply needs to be optimized for the Q10:

The BlackBerry World vendor system allows developers to target their apps to run on the BlackBerry 10 platform broadly or to run specifically on either BlackBerry Q10 or BlackBerry Z10. If they choose to run broadly on the platform, any tweaks that would enhance performance or optimize the experience for screen size may not have been made. Any time our developer teams see or hear of an app that is not performing well, we alert the developer and our community appreciates that. They want the best experience for BlackBerry users too.

So most apps will work well enough without being tailored to a specific handset, but phone-specific optimizations may be needed to get the most out of the hardware. If either the Z10 or Q10 becomes massively more popular than the other handset, this could potentially make the experience a bit worse for those with the less common phone.

Battery life

The Q10 has a removable battery; our review unit came with a second battery and a charging cradle.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Finally, we've arrived at the battery. The Q10 uses a removable 2,100 mAh battery, a slightly higher capacity than the 1,800 mAh battery in the Z10. That, combined with the smaller AMOLED display, gave us hope that the Q10's battery life would be better than the Z10's by a considerable margin. In general use (Web browsing, watching videos, navigating the OS, and doing some light gaming like Angry Birds) with the screen set to 50 percent brightness, however, the Q10 lasted just over eight hours. This is just about identical to the eight hours and 22 minutes we got from the Z10 in similar conditions (20 minutes seems well within the margin of error for something like this, at any rate).

Battery life obviously differs based on what you're doing and how bright the screen is, but it looks like you can expect about the same from both phones—a solid all-day charge, with the opportunity to swap out the battery if you need to be away from an outlet for an extended period.

Is it just your type?

The Q10 has a great keyboard, but the phone still feels outdated.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This is probably what smartphones would look like if the iPhone had been introduced but had flopped. The BlackBerry 10 operating system, which is still primarily touchscreen-driven and borrows many post-iOS elements, seems more radically different from something the RIM of old would have designed. The body of the phone, though, is old-school to the core, from the small, squat screen to the size and shape of the body to the physical keyboard.

Surprisingly enough, it's the screen and not the keyboard that really defined the Q10 for me. Vertical height is a precious resource on most phones, and most manufacturers know it: Android phone screens have been ballooning in size for a while now, and even Apple increased the height of the iPhone 5 display after sticking to its 3.5-inch guns for years. If you've used any other smartphone, even the Z10, for any length of time, the Q10 screen is going to feel confining. You can fit fewer words on it at a time, necessitating more frequent scrolling. Games and other apps run, but it's often obvious that they were programmed with something taller (or wider, in the case of landscape mode) in mind.

Add to the peculiarities of the hardware the things that are more broadly true of the OS: BlackBerry 10 is still a mobile OS in its infancy, struggling against a dearth of applications and packing an interface and some features (the BlackBerry Hub, for example) that potential customers buried in the iOS, Android, or Windows Phone ecosystems won't be familiar with. BlackBerry 10 is an easier sell for people coming from a BlackBerry 7 device, but those folks represent an ever-shrinking slice of the lucrative smartphone pie.