Need a BlackBerry to be just a BlackBerry? No weird designs or touchscreens distracting you? Try the BlackBerry Classic: it just landed at Telstra for a strangely high price.
The Classic has a 3.5-inch 720×720 screen resting on top of a full Qwerty keyboard, all powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor and 2GB of RAM. That means most graphics-heavy applications probably won’t cut it on the Classic, but this smartphone has more of a business vibe anyway.
The classic will come with 16GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera, and a reported 22 hours of battery life. BlackBerry also makes it easy to compare the Classic to your BlackBerry 9900 (you have one of those, right?). It’s definitely “upgraded” as the BlackBerry suggests, of course that phone is also three years old so that kind of makes sense. The Classic will benefit from BlackBerry’s revamped software, BlackBerry 10, featuring Blend, the nifty Hub feature, BlackBerry Assistant, and the Amazon App Store pre-installed.
So how much is BlackBerry’s basic offering going to run your expense account? Well, if you buy it outright, it’s going to run you $504. That’s not bad, considering the US price is $US450. It gets kind of expensive when you look at it on Telstra’s suggested plan. On contract, it will cost you $0 upfront on the $70 Mobile Accelerate plan. While that plan does include $700 worth of calls, unlimited texts and 1.5GB of data, it seems kind of a high plan for a basic phone.
Stay tuned for an Australian review soon!
Darren Orf contributed to this article.