You can’t keep a good man down… This seems to be BlackBerry’s motto as they work tirelessly to ensure their mobile phones do not become obsolete. Shortly after the arrival of the BlackBerry Passport, the BlackBerry Classic gets ready to debut. The BlackBerry Classic is the third physical keyboard BlackBerry 10 device, it brings back the classic trackpad and function keys that we haven’t yet seen on BlackBerry 10 devices.
BlackBerry is going back to their roots and reintroducing the five-button navigation belt to the device and a keyboard with four rows very much unlike the unconventional design of the Passport with a keyboard with three rows. The navigation belt buttons will be clickable and might also have haptic feedback but would not be backlit.
Quick Specs
The BlackBerry Classic’s dimension is 131 x 72.5 x 10.2mm but is a bit weighty at 178g. It packs a 3.46inch LTPS TFT display with 720 x 720 pixel resolution with 294ppi(pixels per inch). It has a traditional 35-key backlit physical keyboard on the bottom half of its body and an optical trackpad at the top.
Its processor runs on a rather old Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset with dual-core Krait architecture at 1.5GHz with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of in-built storage and microSD support of up to 128GB.
It packs an 8MP rear camera capable of 1080p video and a 2MP front camera with 720p video. It has a nanoSIM slot, NFC connectivity, and the usual SlimPort microUSB with a 2515mAh non-removable battery. We can’t say for sure if it’s capable of LTE 4G connectivity. There are three microphones around the body of the device to increase noise cancellation.
Compared to what other brands are releasing, the Classic falls rather short of our expectations.
In a blog post, John Chen – CEO at BlackBerry said, “It’s tempting in a rapidly changing, rapidly growing mobile market to change for the sake of change. But there’s also something to be said for the classic adage, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. We are committed to earning your business – or earning it back, if that’s the case. It took us a lot of pain and suffering and hard work to get to this point. I’m not going to take any unnecessary risk to the balance sheet.’’
