We have had a lot of reception about the new Blackberry Z10 which is a premium device offered by Blackberry (also known as Research in Motion). Smartphone enthusiasts would know that Blackberry had been quite silent for some time now. In fact, there was a time when a smartphone was synonymous to a Blackberry. People used the terms interchangeably and all the top people (like presidents and senate members and military personnel) were motivated towards using Blackberry because of the security aspect of the smartphone. Layman was motivated to use Blackberry because it was The Smartphone at that time. However with the introduction of Apple iPhone and Android changed all that. In particular, Blackberry deteriorated because of their inability to come up with a complete touchscreen smartphone without the buttons. Some may argue that the buttons were essential, but including the buttons more harm than good for RIM. Hence after quite some time when we heard that RIM revealed a full touchscreen smartphone with a brand new operating system; we had every right to be excited. So here goes our first take on Blackberry Z10 and it is compared with one of the industry standards for smartphones in Android operating system; Samsung Galaxy S3.
Blackberry Z10 Review
BlackBerry 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 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.
BlackBerry 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.
Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III) Review
Galaxy S3, the 2012 flagship device of Samsung, comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.
The power of any smartphone lies in its processor and Samsung Galaxy S3 comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs and tops the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S3 with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus.
As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S3 also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S3 can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S2, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features.
Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S3 will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S3 has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.
A smartphone of this calibre needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S3 only supports the use of micro SIM cards.
A Brief Comparison Between Blackberry Z10 and Galaxy S3
• 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 Samsung Galaxy S3 is powered by 1.5GHz Cortex A9 Quad Core processor on top of Samsung Exynos 4412 Quad chipset with Mali 400MP GPU and 1GB of RAM.
• Blackberry Z10 runs on Blackberry 10 OS while Samsung Galaxy S3 runs on Android OS v4.1 Jelly Bean.
• Blackberry Z10 has 4.2 inches capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 355ppi while Samsung Galaxy S3 has 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi.
• Blackberry Z10 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps while Samsung Galaxy S III has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 fps.
• Blackberry Z10 is smaller, thicker and heftier (130 x 65.6 mm / 9 mm / 137.5g) than Samsung Galaxy S3 (136.6 x 70.6mm / 8.6mm / 133g).
• Blackberry Z10 has 1800mAh battery while Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100mAh battery.
Conclusion
To be frank, this is not a fair comparison per se. Samsung Galaxy S3 was released almost a year back while Blackberry Z10 was released recently, and that makes a world of difference in the mobile computing world. However, if you compare the specs on the paper, you can clearly understand that Z10 and S3 don’t seem to differ much. Snapdragon S4 Pro and Exynos 4412 Quad are chipsets of the same timeline and hence we can expect more or less the same performance. However, as you can clearly see, Galaxy S3 features Quad Core processor while Z10 only has Dual Core processor. Although we can build out comparison on these specs, there is another factor that we need to take in to consideration. That is the maturity of the operating system used. Android operating system is well matured and offers a great experience while Blackberry OS 10 has a low maturity and offers you only few applications in their app store. This is certainly going to frighten their customers away for customers won’t have the apps they are so familiar with in everyday life regardless of what operating system they use. For instance, an essential app that is used by almost all the smartphone users is Google Maps; but this isn’t available in Blackberry OS 10 yet. Given the assurance by Blackberry to expand their app store exponentially; die hard Blackberry fans may have gotten their hands on the newest Blackberry device. However, for the layman, Galaxy S3 may be a better choice in terms of operating system maturity and support.