For most outsiders to the BlackBerry platform, the Q10 sounds like a nightmare: get rid of one third to one half of your smartphone’s screen and replace it with a tiny physical keyboard, leaving only half the room for apps and content to display and a new kind of microscopic input to learn. But for longtime BlackBerry users left over from the BB7 heyday, a review of the Q1 sounds makes it sound like the ideal compromise. It’s essentially the Z10, BlackBerry’s new full-screen direct competitor to iPhone and Android, but with the physical keyboard which BB users have long come to rely on and favor over the virtual keyboards of competing platforms.
The double barreled BlackBerry Q10 and Z10 launch is the company’s attempt at splitting the difference between making its remaining user base happy and attempting to attract new users to the platform. From a platform agnostic point of view, the Q10 is anachronistically out of place. While the iPhone 5 has a four inch screen and the Galaxy S4 has a five inch display, the Q1 offers not much more than half that, with the rest of the front face devoted to a few dozen button keys. Scrolling through web pages takes more work due to the small screen, while playing more complex app-bases games is in some cases not feasible. That makes the Q10, by 2013 standards at least, a weaker experience than that of full screen smartphones and won’t attract switchers from other platforms in any number. Contrast that with the fact that slightly more than half of all Z10 sales thus far have been switchers: now that BlackBerry finally offers a full screen touchscreen, at least a few iPhone or Android users are willing to give it a chance.
But for those users who have only ever known half-screen phones, which at this point almost pretty much only describes lifelong BlackBerry users, the Q10 is the device they’ve wanted all along: it lets them get as close to the modern day smartphone experience as possible while still getting to keep their physical keyboard. With most BB7 users admitting that the keyboard was the primary reason they remained with the platform even as it fell behind competitors technologically, the Q10 is their ideal compromise. It’s no iPhone or Android experience, but it should be enough to keep BB7 users in the fold. They’ll just need to be sure to explain to their friends that the Q10 also comes in the full-screen Z10 variation if they hope to have any success in motivating them to switch platforms.
*http://www.stableytimes.com/news/blackberry-q10-physical-keyboard-squareish-screen/
source : http://techie.id1945.com/2013/08/blackberry-q10-physical-keyboard-square/
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