BlackBerry Q10 pictures

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The Z10 was panned, in part, for its crushingly boring design. It’s practically the antithesis of design, really—an unornamented matte black plastic box, thrown together as an afterthought. The Q10 is undeniably a chip off the same block, but it works better this time around: the four straight rows of physical keys, separated by satin metal lines, do an admirable job of breaking up the monotony.

The Q10 also features a nice chamfer and a gentle curve between the front, side, and back, giving it far greater "holdability" than the Z10—it feels good. The back of the Q10 has a matte, three-dimensional carbon fiber look that is classier than it sounds; it has less texture than the Z10’s rear, but the soft-touch finish still has plenty of grip.

It doesn’t have the "precious object" presence of an HTC One or an iPhone 5—but in some respect, I think BlackBerry basically nailed the look and feel of the Q10, which is remarkable considering its forgettable Z10 bloodline. This is more or less exactly what I would expect a modern portrait QWERTY phone to look like: a touchscreen that is neither too big nor too small, a perfectly sized keyboard (more on that in a bit), and an understated, business-appropriate look interspersed with high-end detail.

The Q10’s 720 x 720 AMOLED display is good, but not great. It’s a bit warm—whites come through as very, very light yellows—and the maximum brightness is surprisingly low (this really shows when holding it up next to the Z10, which is much brighter at full tilt). Touch responsiveness was fine, though I would’ve liked a "glove mode"—since it was introduced on the Nokia Lumia 920 and recently featured on the Galaxy S4, it’s something I’d like to see become standard this year, particularly since I live in an area of the country with a real winter.

I had one annoyance brought about by BlackBerry 10’s reliance on gestures: you need to swipe up from the bottom to bring up the multitasking screen and "go home." That’s totally fine on the Z10, where you’ve got a big bezel beneath the display on which to start your swipe, but on the Q10, that means you need to basically swipe up from the keyboard. It just feels weird, like BlackBerry didn’t consider the notion of a physical keyboard when it designed that gesture. I also found myself occasionally swiping up to scroll a menu or web page and inadvertently bringing up the multitasking display—likewise, that isn’t an issue either on the Z10 where the bottom of the screen is much lower relative to your thumb.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the appeal of these actions for users who live and die by the Q10’s keyboard—and there will be many of those users, I’m sure—but I didn’t really see the advantage, personally. I was never able to convince myself that I was saving much (if any) time by typing out what I want to do on the phone rather than simply tapping the app and executing the command on the screen. (For what it’s worth, BlackBerry will be delivering actions to the Z10 as well once the 10.1 update starts rolling out.)

In a way, these actions feel like one of the fundamental rifts between the full-touch and keyboard philosophies of mobile computing: how do you want to get things done? If you’re willing to take the time to learn the Q10’s full list of keyboard shortcuts, you’ll no doubt shoot around the operating system a little bit faster, but I can’t imagine recommending this to anyone who isn’t already using a phone with a physical keyboard. If you’re already a fast and effective typist on a full-touch phone, the perceived advantage of the Q10’s form factor quickly evaporates, even taking actions and shortcuts into consideration.

More generally, when they're side by side, the Q10 feels faster than the Z10—scrolling is notably smoother, for instance. I don’t know whether we have 10.1 to thank for that or the fact that the Q10 simply has fewer pixels that it needs to manage, but it’s an improvement.

I would be willing to bet that the average BlackBerry user spends more time on voice calls than other users, and that makes sound quality even more important than usual. The Q10 is in a good place here: the earpiece is plenty clear (though I can always use one more notch of volume for extremely noisy environments), and the loudspeaker—a big meshed slot on the bottom of the phone—has a boomy quality that might be second only to the hilariously loud HTC One. Callers told me that they didn’t hear a peep of background noise when I was in a Starbucks filled with people and music.

The camera hardware in the Q10 is identical to that of the Z10, and so performance seems to be roughly the same—in daylight, I was able to produce images that were just fine, though colors were muted (less so on the phone’s vibrant AMOLED display than on my laptop’s LCD). Time Shift, which takes a burst of shots to choose from and lets you replace the faces of people who are blinking or frowning, is present on the Q10, but I’d argue slightly less useful than on the Z10: you need to make decisions about which shot to choose and which faces to use on a much smaller screen, and you can’t zoom the shot (detected faces are automatically magnified, but you can’t zoom in on other areas of the image). Frustratingly, it’s a one-time decision; you can’t go back to an old Time Shift image and change your mind.

BlackBerry 10.1 also adds support for HDR. I was impressed with how fast the phone seemed to snap HDR shots, but in practice, it didn’t make much of a difference for HDR’s notorious ghosting—I was actually getting giant ghosts on images of completely stationary objects, possibly because the camera is spending more time snapping photos than the shutter sound and UI lead you to believe, so you inadvertently start to move the camera before it’s actually done doing its work.

Our Q10’s review kit came with a nifty, extremely compact external battery charger powered by Micro USB, but you’ll probably only need to juice up that second cell if you’re putting in an inordinately long day (and night) away from a wall outlet. In my testing I had no issue making it through a full day of use in and around AT&T;’s LTE network; in fact, there was a moment early in the afternoon where just a tiny sliver of the battery meter was missing after several hours of intermittent calling, texting, and browsing. On balance, it seems to do noticeably better than the Z10, which makes sense: it’s a smaller screen paired with a bigger battery (2,100 mAh versus the Z10’s 1,800 mAh).