Blackberry Z10 is one of the most important products ever manufactured by Research In Motion for a variety of reasons. Let me start by emphasizing how important it is to Research In Motion (otherwise known as RIM or Blackberry). As you may have already noticed; Blackberry smartphones are not the easiest smartphones to come-by. Their market penetration has seen enough diminishing returns for a decade. Like Nokia, Blackberry was THE Smartphone back in the days before Apple iPhone or Google Android came in to play. But like Nokia, they also failed to evolve and as a result, RIM has seen a lot of budget cuts and layoffs. In fact, they have taken too long to introduce their new smartphone and associated smart operating system. This has made them fall behind the race significantly and, what’s more, unlike the Nokia, Blackberry will have to tackle the issue with the app market, as well. So when RIM released BB Z10, we were excited to see where it would lead the RIM as a manufacturer. It has a strong resemblance to Apple iPhone 5 compared to any other smartphone out there in the market when you take the outlook. Hence we decided to compare it with Apple iPhone 5 to understand what took RIM so much of time to release a competing smartphone to the market. This is what we found out. We’ll explain our take on BB Z10 first and move on to our take on Apple iPhone 5 and compare them at the end.
Blackberry Z10 Review
BB Z10 is a smartphone that would determine whether we will see any more BB devices in the market or not. Having that in mind, we should commend on Z10 for its elegant looks that closely resembles the square-type outlook of Apple iPhone 5. This is not to say that Z10 is stylistically vibrant; in fact, it rather has a gloomy take on that with the monochrome exterior, but it is also elegantly built that may catch the eyes of the executives as usual. A remarkable difference compared to iPhone 5 is the horizontal bands that span at the top and the bottom. It comes with 4.2 inch capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 355ppi. Z10 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 chipset with Adreno 225 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The operating system at play is RIM Blackberry 10 OS which comes brand-new to this device. As we stressed before; the future of BBs depend on Z10 and BB 10 OS, as well. It is more or less like any smartphone OS we see nowadays with a couple of tricks in its sleeve. However, we are visibly worried about the prehistoric applications available in their app store which creates a huge void in modern customers mind. In fact, some of the applications suggested by the OS were rather stale and not monitored because they were actually apps created for the Playbook and looks disoriented in Z10. RIM promises that they’ll be upgrading the app store in the near future with a lot more applications with sounds like a solace.
BB Z10 features 4G LTE connectivity as well as 3G HSDPA connectivity which is a great step to reach more audience. The web browsing seems super-fast as well tripping the balance towards buying a Z10. It also features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. The internal storage is at 16GB with the ability to expand storage using microSD card up to 32GB. We commend RIM for including a micro HDMI port in BB Z10 for better connectivity. BB Z10 has 8 MP cameras with LED flash that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with continuous autofocus and image stabilization. The secondary camera is 2 MP and can capture 720p videos @ 30 fps. There are some interesting additions in the camera interface for BB 10. The interface, of course, needs some polishing up, but you can take a time shift photo of a group and select individual faces within that short span depending on your preferences. BB Z10 also has a Map application, but that is mediocre, to say the least. RIM will need to do a lot of convincing to make people use that map application over Google Maps or even the newly released Apple Maps. However compared to Blackberry 7 (which is apparently the predecessor of BB 10), BB 10 is really good and gesture based. It allows you to have either concurrently running application emulating the multi-tasking, also featuring Blackberry hub. BB Hub is like a list of every communication line you have which might be alarmingly crowded but can easily be filtered, as well. BB Z10 has a removable battery of 1800mAh that is estimated to last for 8 hours, which is average.
Apple iPhone 5 Review
Apple iPhone 5 that was announced on 12th September is the successor for the prestigious Apple iPhone 4S. The phone is in the top shelf of the market since 21st of September 2012. Apple claims iPhone 5 to be the thinnest smartphone in the market scoring a thickness of 7.6mm which is really cool. The handset scores dimensions of 123.8 x 58.5mm and 112g of weight which makes it lighter than most of the smartphones out there in the world. Apple has kept the width at the same pace while making it taller in order to let the customers hang on to the familiar width when they hold the handset in their palms. It is made entirely from glass and Aluminum which is a great news for artistic consumers. No one would doubt the premium nature of this handset for Apple has tirelessly engineered even the smallest parts. The two tone back plate feels genuinely metallic and is pleasing to hold on to the handset. We particularly loved the Black model although Apple offers a White model, as well.
iPhone 5 uses an Apple A6 chipset along with Apple iOS 6 as the operating system. It will be powered by a 1GHz Dual Core processor that Apple has come up with for iPhone 5. This processor is said to have Apple’s own SoC using ARM v7 based instruction set. The cores are based on Cortex A7 architecture which was previously rumored to be of A15 architecture. It is to be noted that this is not the Vanilla Cortex A7, but rather an in-house modified version of Apple’s Cortex A7 probably fabricated by Samsung. Apple iPhone 5 being a LTE smartphone, we are bound to expect some deviation from the normal battery life. However, Apple has addressed that problem with the custom made Cortex A7 cores. As you can see, they haven’t increased the clock frequency at all, but instead, they have been successful in increasing the number of instructions executed per clock. Also, it was noticeable in the GeekBench benchmarks that the memory bandwidth has been significantly improved, as well. So all in all, now we have reason to believe that Tim Cook wasn’t exaggerating when he claimed that iPhone 5 is twice as faster as iPhone 4S. The internal storage would come in three variations of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB with no option to expand storage using microSD card.
Apple iPhone 5 has 4 inch LED backlit IPS TFT capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels at a pixel density of 326ppi. It is said to have 44% better color saturation with full sRGB rendering enabled. The usual Corning gorilla glass coating is available making the display scratch resistant. Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that this is the most advanced display panel in the world. Apple also claimed that the GPU performance is as twice better compared to iPhone 4S. There may be several other possibilities for them to achieve this, but we have reason to believe that the GPU is PowerVR SGX 543MP3 with a slightly overclocked frequency compared to that of iPhone 4S. Apple has apparently moved the headphone port all the down to the bottom of the smartphone. If you have invested in iReady accessories, you may well have to buy a conversion unit because Apple has introduced a new port for this iPhone.
The handset comes with 4G LTE connectivity as well as CDMA connectivity in different versions. The implications of this are subtle. Once you commit to a network provider and a specific version of Apple iPhone 5, there’s no going back. You can’t buy an AT&T model and then transfer the iPhone 5 to Verizon or Sprint’s network without buying another iPhone 5. So you will have to think rather carefully on what you want before committing to a handset. Apple boasts of an ultrafast Wi-Fi connectivity as well offering Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n dual band Wi-Fi Plus cellular adapter. Unfortunately, Apple iPhone 5 doesn’t feature NFC connectivity nor does it support wireless charging. The camera is the regular culprit of 8MP with autofocus and LED flash that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. It also has a front camera to make video calls. It is worthwhile to note that Apple iPhone 5 only supports nano SIM card. The new operating system seems to provide better capabilities than the old one as usual.
A Brief Comparison Between Blackberry Z10 and Apple iPhone 5
• Blackberry Z10 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset with Adreno 225 GPU and 2GB of RAM while Apple iPhone 5 is powered by 1GHz Dual Core processor that is based on Cortex A7 architecture on top of Apple A6 chipset.
• Blackberry Z10 runs on Blackberry 10 OS while Apple iPhone 6 runs on Apple iOS 6.
• Blackberry Z10 has 4.2 inches capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 355ppi while Apple iPhone 5 has 4 inch LED backlit IPS TFT capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels at a pixel density of 326ppi.
• Blackberry Z10 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps while Apple iPhone 5 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 fps.
• Blackberry Z10 is bigger, thicker and heftier (130 x 65.6 mm / 9 mm / 137.5g) than Apple iPhone 5 (123.8 x 58.6mm / 7.6mm / 112g).
• Blackberry Z10 has 1800mAh battery while Apple iPhone 5 has 1440mAh battery.
Conclusion
We do not intend to jump into a conclusion without giving BB Z10 a proper run; after all, it’s a matter of life and death for RIM and Blackberry. However, we can presume this much from the facts on the paper. BB Z10 will be comparably powerful as iPhone 5 or any Android equivalence. In fact, the powerfulness should usually come in terms of the applications available in the market that can smoothly run on the device and, on a measure like that, Z10 surpasses all the comparative devices, but that is not fair for others because the number of applications in the BB market is meager, to say the least. However we acknowledge that BB10 as an OS is comparable with the rest of the smartphone operating systems like iOS, Android and Windows Phone; but we also emphasize the fact that BB 10 has to be constantly improved. Keeping that on mind, we see BB Z10 as a potential threat to Apple iPhone 5 and the rest of the top end smartphones in the market.