Q10 India: Another last-chance saloon guzzle for BlackBerry
Fingers on buttons, ladies and gentlemen please ... oh please
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BlackBerry's last, best hope has launched in India to cautious reviews which like the hardware - but echo concerns that it's too little too late.
India is an important market for the company formerly known as RIM, and one where it has lost ground to home-grown alternatives and Samsung. With 218 million subcontinental handsets rapidly being upgraded to smartphones, the Q10 needs to succeed there.
The Q10 is the keyboard-equipped version of the Z10, itself a nice piece of hardware which tries to compete with Android and iOS platforms, but its retention of a physical keyboard sets the Q10 as a communication device with smartphone pretentions, rather than the other way round as seen with most of its rivals. Our review of the Q10 illuminates that thinking, and it plays to the BlackBerry strengths - though it remains a very expensive handset by Indian standards.
The Indian smartphone market is exploding, IDC puts the number of smartphones at 16.3 million against that national population of 218 million handsets which is itself growing 16 per cent annually. The same report also pegs smartphone growth at 70 per cent in 2013, which should leave space for a Q10 or two (million).
India is also less polarised than other markets, with the iPhone less dominant thanks to cheap smartphones from Samsung and Micromax - and Nokia's Lumia taking Windows Phone into the region - so BlackBerry could have an easier time of it than elsewhere.
But that's assuming the Indian government allows it to. The security of the BlackBerry platform has been an ongoing annoyance to the local intelligence agencies which has led India to repeatedly threaten to ban BlackBerry devices unless it is given means of lawful intercept. It seems likely (though it remains unconfirmed) that BlackBerry now has servers within Indian jurisdiction, but anyone running their own BES remains beyond the reach of the authorities just as they do elsewhere in the world.
That won't matter to most Q10 buyers, who'll be more interested in the keyboard than the security behind it, but it remains a key selling point to the corporations from which BlackBerry so desperately needs support. ®
COMMENTS
Latest Comments
Anyone high up will want an Apple i-thing...
Not at my company, we all (owners included) got Z10s and Q10s and one of the owners went back to his BB 9900 because fits in hand better and didn't like size of Q10. Our wives all have iPhones and we could have got iPhones but seeing the big deal with iOS 6 was Facebook... I like the easily replaceable battery and SD card slot much more than Facebook, in fact we are a construction company and nobody here uses Facebook, or if they do they would never admit it. We got iPads at home for playing games, watching videos and toying around, don't need that on our phones. iPad better than Playbook and BB Phone better than iPhone, and we got Win 7 64 bit on our desktops where the real work happens.
"It's simply the best BlackBerry ever"
Possibly, but that isn't exactly setting the bar very high.
Windows Phone is annihilating Blackberry in the market - latest Kantar figures for last month were Blackberry 0.7%, Windows Phone 5.6% sales market share.
Nokia
I agree with you that Nokia probably have a much better strategy, but rather than the 501 as a better comparison with the Q10 the upcoming 210 has a qwerty keyboard. Camera and other spacs are lower than the Q10, but that's why for about $80 an adequate phone can be purchased, and a dual-SIM option as well.
I own and prefer the Samsung 5512 which is my BB equivalent but with Android and dual-SIM, so functionality wise it beats everything that I can think of despite a few shortcomings such as no flash for the camera.
