BlackBerry Classic review: Should you even bother ?
I was shocked how much people would pay for a real keyboard on a phone – 149$ bucks to be more precise.
BlackBerry say’s that this price would do, but also they say it’s primarily a business phone, and maybe that this is true, but except for the hardcore blackberry fans is it appliable for the bigger market – outside of die hard fans?
The idea behind the BlackBerry Classic is simple and respectful. To create a phone that’s designed to appeal to hardcore original Blackberry fans in every way possible. If there is something you loved in the BlackBerry bold 2011 you would almost surely find it in here. Everything is designed to make die-hard users feel at home. It starts with the hardware which is characterized by the return of all the buttons. That even includes dedicated send and end buttons, back button and menu key, and a optical trackpad that’s actually necessary. They’re all functions that have been replaced by touchscreen gestures and by touch screen buttons. Blackberry 10 love those gestures that are actually kinda funky, so having these buttons speeds things up a little bit, and then there’s an optical trackpad which is a hilarious mouse like throwback that feels completely vestigial, until you figure out you can use it to do some really need multi-select tricks in your inbox. Many find it useful, but it’s still funny and kinda weird, but the most important ones are all on the keyboard. The keyboard is just plain simple perfection- fast and clicky, and responsive, and just plain satisfying in a way glass never is. You could get picky is bold or curve better ones, but whatever who cares? There is nobody else even bothering to make key parts right now so this is as good as it gets.
This is blackberry through and through – it’s easy to hold in one hand, it has a textured back to make it more slippery resistant, and it has a pretty good but not great 720 by 720 square touchscreen which works fine for email, but it feels weird for basically anything else. It’s also pretty heavy thanks to a pretty big battery ( you can’t replace by the way), but it lasted a little bit longer than your average mid-size smartphone so that’s kinda like in favor for BlackBerry’s.
There is one more thing from yesteryear – the processor in a shell its dated and combined with socket issues that make the classic feel a little bit like it’s a weird mix of fast – while doing emails and slow everywhere else, as a legacy from all old BlackBerries. I wish they had left this one behind, and one more terrible legacy that the classic had inherit- truly bad camera. The shooter is so slow that I missed more shots that I could make. The subprime Blackberry classic is kinda all over the place in version 10.3.1 and that means Blackberry has spent the past couple of years layering on every possible feature request from it’s hardcore keyboard shortcut customers. Through you don’t have to need to know all those shortcuts.
If you take the time to learn them you can do all sorts of the tricks, but if you don’t have a keyboard around to speed up other things. From the home screen you can type to bring up the BlackBerry assistant, which is most like Siri but a little bit better in some ways and you can type at it instead of talking to it. Actually you can do either because who talks anymore? I guess some people do, and lucky for them call quality in the classic is pretty great. Back to the software side because at the end of the day it’s just not good enough for anybody but the hardest of hardcore BlackBerry fans.
There are few good ideas here and there, but there are also just too many compromises – there’s still two different app stores one – for blackberry software and Amazon for Android software, but that means you won’t get the apps you want and even when you do they are either out of date or just painfully slow and buggy on the Blackberry classic.
Blackberry says that this is primarily a business phone and maybe that’s true but more than that, this is phone as fan service- it’s from blackberry people for blackberry people, for the people who are still clinging for dear life to they’re aging Bold. The Classic educate that Blackberry death grip is going but honestly it’s probably time to let go.