BlackBerry Q10 keyboard is addictive, and apps improving

The BlackBerry Q10 qwerty keyboard is excellent for messaging, but sacrifice has had to be made on screen size because of it
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This digital life

John Davidson

    I could write this week’s review, of BlackBerry’s Q10 smartphone, with four words and one punctuation mark: It has a keyboard!
That’s all you need to know. Either you’ve been dying for a good keyboard phone to come out, in which case the BlackBerry Q10 is almost certainly the phone for you, or you haven’t, in which case, forget it. Don’t even read on.
Those four words and that one punctuation mark completely define the phone. They mean that the Q10 is completely brilliant for messaging – for email, SMS, Twitter, Google Talk (now renamed “Hangouts”), and BlackBerry’s own excellent messaging system BBM – and they mean that it’s not all that brilliant for a lot of other apps, those that need screen real estate more than they need a keyboard.
The Q10 is the second and arguably the most important BlackBerry’s comeback phones, as it tries to find its way out of the smartphone wilderness. For people who still own an old BlackBerry, or who regret having been chased away from the BlackBerry platform by its tragic lack of modern apps, moving to the Q10 should be something of a no-brainer.
It has the same excellent keyboard as the Bold 9000 series phones, and it has adequately (though far from completely) solved the apps problem with its marvellous new operating system, BlackBerry 10.
But for people who have never used a keyboard phone before, and who value entertainment, media and navigation as highly as they value messaging, it’s a trickier proposition. Between BlackBerry 10’s universal inbox (known as the “hub”) and the keyboard, it’s easily the best messaging phone on the market, but its weaknesses in other areas will be enough to keep many new users away. Mapping and navigation on the Q10, even more so than on its keyboardless sister the BlackBerry Z10, lags far behind what Google is doing on its Android phones, for instance, and the Q10’s camera isn’t nearly as good as the camera on Samsung’s Galaxy S4. The web browser, while actually very good and very fast, suffers from the fact that the Q10, by sheer virtue of its keyboard, has a square screen that’s just 720 x 720 ­pixels. Sony’s Xperia Z has a 1080 x 1920 pixel screen, and its browsing is all the better for it.
So it all comes down to the keyboard, and how much you’re willing to give up to have one. For me personally, it’s a judgement call that’s so close as to be physically painful: I desperately want the Q10’s messaging capabilities, but I desperately want one or two apps the Q10 lacks, such as Spotify. I’m torn in two by this phone.
Though I must say, the list of major apps that BlackBerry 10 OS lacks is getting shorter by the month. It now has Skype, and there’s also a version of Instagram that runs very well on the Z10 and passably well on the Q10, if you can live with the fact that the Q10’s small screen has rendered all the buttons invisible. (They’ re there, but are hidden behind any photos you load. It’s weird, but will do if you’re desperate.)
The interesting thing about the keyboard on the Q10 is that, depending on how often you repeat yourself, it’s not necessarily all that much faster to use than a good on-screen keyboard. In my tests, typing complicated passages of text with lots of long, unusual words, I was able to type on the Q10 at 32 words a minute with 100 per cent accuracy. On the Z10, which I believe has the best predictive keyboard on the market thanks to the way it positions its predictions right on the on-screen keyboard, I typed those same passages at anywhere between 21 and 58 words a minute, depending on how familiar the Z10 was with what I was typing. (By the time I typed the same passages for the third time on the Z10, I barely had to type at all: it accurately predicted every word. That’s true of the Q10, too, but the fact that the predictions are on the screen above the keyboard, rather than on the keyboard, makes it far less appealing to use the Q10’s predictive text.)
Nevertheless, despite generally being only slightly faster to use (and occasionally much slower), the keyboard on the Q10 still feels much better to use, mainly due to the fact you can achieve roughly the same typing speeds with just a fraction of the concentration. With physical keys under your thumbs, you barely need to think about the pro­cess of typing at all, much less the pro­cess of using predictive text, so you’re freed up to concentrate on what you’re actually writing.
It makes a big difference, and once you add the Q10’s famous keyboard shortcuts into the mix (you can start a Twitter message from the homescreen just by typing the word “tweet” for instance) , the whole thing gets pretty addictive. They weren’t called CrackBerries for nothing.
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