A certain friend of mine is a happy camper. He’s got his hands on the BlackBerry Classic and finally everything feels like it should be. Not for him, those large snazzy touch-screens that make it easy to do everything except type. Mail is coming in, the light is flashing, messages are flowing, and he tackles them with the reassuring clicks of the much-loved QWERTY keyboard on the BlackBerry. My friend is exactly who the BlackBerry Classic is intended for.
The BlackBerry Classic comes in on the heels of another physical keyboard device, the Passport. Despite its odd size ratio, it has intrigued many and it’s generally considered a most interesting and innovative device. But the BlackBerry Classic is closer to being a blast from the past and is like a big upgrade to the Bold 9900, a popular smartphone in its heyday.
Like the Bold and other BlackBerry devices, the Classic is solid. In fact, solider than most. I’d venture to say you could hurl it at the boss and send him into oblivion, if your aim is right.
It’s a thickish phone and you feel its weight and while it’s just the opposite of the thin slivers that pass off as phones these days, it’s also reassuringly substantial. You certainly don’t find yourself worrying about whether it’ll shatter into a million pieces if it’s dropped.
It’s a bit heavy, but because it’s larger than the older BlackBerry phones and has a physical keyboard, the weight tends to stabilise it in your hands as you press down on keys. A solid keyboard on a thin large phone would have been off-balance.
The Classic is all about the keyboard and brings back the familiar in response to customer feedback, as the company’s top execs tell us. The keyboard has features that no non-BlackBerry phone does — unless there’s a rip off of one.
On the Classic it’s under a 3.5-inch touch screen and topped by control keys like the BlackBerry menu, call control, back key and the track button. One could perform all these functions with the touch screen — but that’s just what BlackBerry users are not comfortable with. The keys themselves are nicely separated and give you touch and click feedback so you’re not wondering whether you typed or not. Old time users’ fingers should fly on this keyboard.
Unlike the Passport, which had a slightly different take on the keyboard and an awkwardly small space bar, the Classic keyboard is just that — classic. It doesn’t have the touch sensitive layer that the Passport has, but I’m guessing BlackBerry loyalists won’t mind at all. To go with the Classic’s keyboard are BlackBerry’s usual shortcuts and then some. Again, it’s the fan club that’s used to these while someone who hasn’t been a BB user, like me, is driven slowly round the bend figuring it all out. After all, coming up very soon is eye tracking where all you’ll have to do is look to make something happen on a phone.
The modern half of the Classic is all about OS 10.3, BlackBerry’s current age operating system, central to which is the wonderful BlackBerry Hub. Meant entirely for communicators on steroids, this OS caters to the business-minded, those who want secure mail and messaging all in one place, with everything else being quite peripheral.
BlackBerry has its own store, but there really aren’t that many brilliant apps. So what they’ve done is to make it possible to download Android apps from the Amazon store and by “sideloading”. Some apps work fine, but others don’t quite fit into the squarish screen format and nor are they meant for a BlackBerry device in the first place.
The hardware specs are passé, going by today’s standards, but the argument is that you don’t need more as what’s there is enough to do the central tasks smoothly.
The camera is average — not as good as the Passport’s — and the battery is good. So is sound quality. The processor powering the Classic is a Qualcom Snapdragon 1.5GHz dual-core with 2GB of RAM. You have 16GB internal storage plus a card slot. It takes a micro SIM.
But BB fans, be prepared to pay Rs 31,990 on Snapdeal for the return of your beloved phone.
| Yu Yureka |
 Gone in a flash. A flash sale, to be accurate. The Yu Yureka smartphone, coming from a spin-off company from Micromax, disappeared off the shelves of Amazon.in in a matter of seconds. Indian customers are no strangers to this gamified selling format. You stay alert for when the sale begins, and press the buy button quick. A second too late and you’ll join the many disgruntled would-be-customers who missed out. But if you are quick, you’ll be the victorious owner of a real value-for-money smartphone for just Rs 8,990. No wonder people are happy to snap up the Yu Yureka. It’s got itself a totally different look from Micromax’s Canvas series phones. The Yu is solid, well-built, and not cheap looking at all.
It has an extra soft removeable back with a big Yu logo. The Yu is said to be a re-branded Chinese phone and that’s a fact that quite rightly unsettles many potential customers. Would that mean the device hasn’t been crafted and optimised for what it delivers? Well, yes and no. The specs on this phone are not bad — especially the powerful octa-core processor and graphics chip. The rest is middling, including a battery that should have been more than 2,500mAh to work with the large 5.5-inch screen the Yu is wearing. But consider all features and specs in relation to the price. And here’s where the other big draw for the Yu comes in. It’s a Cyanogen OS 11-based phone, a variant of Android that allows for a whole lot more customisation than you would get with regular Android phones. Cyanogen gives you control over your lockscreen, colour themes, the look of the icons, the status bar, and more. The phone works so fast that the customisations are genuinely usable and enjoyable rather than just gimmicks. The Yu is a fun phone for those who like to do a lot with their device — without having to pay too much. |
(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 23-02-2015)
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
