BlackBerry Q10 Hands-On: QWERTY Awesomeness + Great Web Experience

After taking a look at the BlackBerry Z10, we wanted to shift our focus on the Q10 since we know many BlackBerry owners out there still love their phones to have physical keyboards. The Q10 gives you the best of both worlds as not only does it offer a QWERTY keyboard for you to poke at, but the device runs BlackBerry 10, which means you’ll have an experience just as good as those Z10 folk!

The keys for the BlackBerry Q10 are 30% larger than the BlackBerry Bold’s and are spaced out in a straight line. The keys felt good, although I had to retrain my brain a little to get back to using physical keys. Pressing down on each key of the Q10 offered a nice response as each key clicked under pressure.

The predictive text that’s available in BB10 is changed a little bit in the Q10. As you type out your word, a small section of the Q10′s screen displays some words you might be in the middle of typing. Once the Q10 predicts your word, you can then select it to have it automatically input. I felt the process of jumping back and forth between typing something out with the keyboard and checking the predictive text not as easy to use as it is in the Z10, although I certainly appreciate the effort.

Besides the keyboard, you can nearly do everything on the Q10 that you could on the Z10. You’ll be able to use the BlackBerry Hub in order to check out alerts, take photos and view videos, just on a smaller screen. But when you factor in you have a physical keyboard, which we knew BlackBerry owners can’t live without, then the smaller screen size is worth it.