The much-anticipated BlackBerry Z10 has finally hit virtual and land-based store shelves. Forgoing the typical physical QWERTY keyboard which has been found on previous BlackBerries, the BlackBerry Z10 delivers a large high-resolution display that is entirely touch screen driven. The handset launched this week on the AT&T 4G LTE network in the United States, at a retail price of $199 on contract at online retailers like the Amazon Wireless store. And surprisingly, at least one tech analyst known to be bearish on BlackBerry stock in the past says early sales have beat expectations.
Jefferies tech analyst Peter Misek is famous as a bear for RIM, now officially named BlackBerry, for many years. He recently stated that early sales now that the phone has been released in the US on the AT&T network have exceeded his expectations. That is good news since, surprisingly enough, AT&T retail outlets have done little to advertise or announce the arrival of the handset. The BlackBerry Z10 debuts the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, and is being released at about the same time as the BlackBerry Q10, which is basically the Z10 with a smaller touchscreen and a physical keyboard.
The handset looks more like an Android or iOS operated smartphone than previous BlackBerries, and measures a thin 0.35 inches (9.0 mm) in thickness. The display runs a large 4.2 inches, delivering a very high pixel density of 356 pixels per inch. That gives that screen an overall resolution of 760 x 1,280 pixels, easily the best resolution for any BlackBerry smartphone. That display offers more than 16 million colors, and accepts the standard capacitive, multitouch gestures for navigation.
BlackBerry chose an 1,800 mA battery to power their Z10 phone, and that cell delivers a full 10.0 hours of talk time and 13.0 days of standby battery power from a single charge. Qualcomm has contributed their Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 system chip, built around a dual core 1.5 GHz Krait CPU. An Adreno 225 GPU is also on board, as is 2.0 GB of RAM memory and 16 GB of built-in data storage space. MicroSD, microSDHC and microSDXC support for memory cards up to 64 GB in size is also present.
The BlackBerry Z10 can function as a mobile hotspot for multiple wireless devices, and provides NFC wireless support out-of-the-box. The front facing chat cam runs 2.0 megapixels, and also provides video call support. Built into the back of the BlackBerry Z10 for AT&T is an 8.0 megapixel camcorder that provides video capture at 1,080P HD resolution.
