BlackBerry Classic

The Classic is a smartphone that is, depending on your viewpoint, another sign of BlackBerry’s renaissance, or the final nail in an already doomed company’s coffin.

The Classic is the latest handset from BlackBerry. But unlike the Passport that was the company’s previous headline grabber, the Classic is quite literally a classic BlackBerry. A smartphone with a hardware qwerty keyboard. A squat black slab with ‘BlackBerry’ at the top and a keyboard at the bottom.

The Classic looks exactly like you remember every BlackBerry looking. It’s both shorter, thicker, heavier and more rounded than you expect from a modern smartphone. We measured it at 131x72x10mm, and it weighed in at 182g on the PC Advisor scales. (BlackBerry claims 178g, and we are not going to fall out about 4g.)

Compared to flagships such as the Galaxy S6 Edge, the HTC One M9 or – yes – the iPhone 6, the BlackBerry Classic is not blessed with conventional good looks. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and those looking for a BlackBerry will have truly met their match.

In the hand, it feels like a sturdy and well balanced device. You need the relative bulk to make use of the qwerty keyboard, and it has to be said that having never been a BlackBerry fan we quickly got to grips with typing on the BlackBerry Classic. If you type a lot of text, and you want to do so one-handed, the BlackBerry Classic will be good for you. That thick 10mm mid-rift feels thicker than it ought, but it adds to the pleasing heft and solidity of the device. Around the side we see a silver metallic strip, which features volume and power buttons on the top righthand side, and speakers and a USB port at the bottom.

On the left as you look are SIMand SD Card slots, and at the very top is the 3.5mm audio jack and a power/home button. The back of the BlackBerry Classic has a curved and textured plastic finish. The centre is set a silver BlackBerry logo. At the top we find a thin reflective strip that features the word ‘Classic’, and to the left the camera lens and flash.

But the front of the Classic is what you will spend your time looking at. This features the classic BlackBerry fascia. The screen takes up around 60 percent of the front, the keyboard sits beneath it. Above the screen is a thick bezel which contains the word ‘BlackBerry’, a speaker grille, and the front-facing camera aperture.

Overall the effect is of black and silver – black, plastic and metallic finish. The Classic looks smart if a little staid. It feels sturdy if bulky, and will certainly stand up to a life on the road. And it is most recognisably a BlackBerry. And unlike the BlackBerry Passport it feels perfectly balanced in the hand. So much for looks and build: let’s get into the important stuff.

Display and keyboard

So there’s a keyboard. And on a relatively low-slung smartphone, that means you lose some screen real-estate. As with much that is interesting about the BlackBerry Classic, this will either repel or intrigue you.

The Classic has a 3.5in display, but it is a screen unlike any other (apart from the BlackBerry Passport). That is because – like BlackBerry’s phablet with keyboard – the Classic’s display has a 1:1 aspect ratio. That’s right, it is perfectly square. Next to virtually every other display on every other smartphone that may seem like a bad thing. But the BlackBerry Classic is unashamedly a productivity tool. Indeed, its main function is as an email and messenger tool.

The screen is brilliant for readingand responding to email, pretty good for browsing websites. Because it isn’t as big as is the Passport the Classic’s screen is not as good for reading and editing spreadsheets, but it offers a passable experience. Just don’t watch movies, play games, or look at photos. Not if you have an aversion to seeing two thirds of the screen taken up by black borders, anyway. In terms of consumer entertainment we live in a widescreen world.

The display isn’t as high-end as is the Passport’s, either. A resolution of 720x720 pixels offers a now-uppermiddle-class pixel density of 294ppi. We couldn’t honestly say that we found the sharpness to be lacking when using the Classic, in part perhaps because we weren’t going to watch video or look at photos anyway. The shape of the display somewhat precludes that.

Ah, the keyboard. Since the iPhone appeared in 2007, the very idea of a hardware keyboard on your smartphone has seemed passé. Really, who needs one? But we praise BlackBerry for returning to its strengths: it may be that very few people want a keyboard on their phone, but those that do will want the BlackBerry Classic.

And it is a good keyboard. The keys are aligned in four rows, with a thin silver line in-between each. The keys are each textured in such a way that very quickly you can type without looking. To the uninitiated BlackBerry typist having to hit Alt in order to type numbers and symbols is a pain, but a pain that you quickly get over. The keys give pleasant and useful feedback, and feel robust enough to last.

Specs and performance

Let’s talk numbers. The Classic is built around a dual-core chip. A Qualcomm MSM 8960 running at 1.5GHz. This feels relatively underpowered in a quad-core world, but it is paired with a healthy 2GB RAM. And we can’t honestly say that the Classic is a slow or underpowered smartphone. Far from it. In use, it feels responsive and zippy. We wouldn’t rely on it to play powerful games, but that is not why you would purchase a BlackBerry.