BlackBerry has taken covers off its new flagship – and much rumored handset, the Z30 earlier today. The handset expands the BlackBerry OS 10 line up even further and it will join the Z10, Q5 and the Q10 as a formidable line up of handsets spanning varied price and market segments. The Z10, thanks to its huge 5 inch display sort of encroaches on to the phablet territory and happens to be the biggest screened BlackBerry ever. It will also run the latest version of BB OS 10 when the product goes on sale in the weeks to come. The display is of the Super AMOLED type and sports a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels – which is sort of low when you compare it to some of the newer Androids with full HD displays – but from experience, I am quite sure that these 720p displays are good enough. If you bother too much about the PPI count, this display measures in at 295 ppi.
Under the hood powering the handset is a dual-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset supported by 2GB of RAM. The phone gets an adequate sounding 2,880 mAh battery and happens to be just 9.4mm thick. As for network support, this one gets comprehensive HSDPA and GSM support along with LTE. Other connectivity options include dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC. The imaging department is taken care of by the 8MP camera with an f/2.2 lens.The camera can also record videos in 1080p resolution. There is a 2 megapixel front camera as well with 720p video capturing ability.
Like we mentioned earlier, the Z30 runs BB OS 10 version 10.2 – which is the latest avatar of BlackBerry 10. There are quite a few improvements (as expected) with this update including stuff like a BB Priority Hub, message previews in the lockscreen and support for Wi-Fi Direct. The phone now also support multiple alarms and standard Unicode emojis.
The phone is expected to be available in select markets by next week – although BlackBerry is still mum about a launch date or the price. As for existing Q10 and Z10 users, BlackBerry would be updating these phones to the latest version of OS 10 by mid October.
