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Gone also is the physical trackpad – as well as the call and hang up buttons – that formed the main controls of the Curve, Bold and other previous QWERTY BlackBerry devices.

There is a comfortable weight and density to the device that, unlike its full-touch sibling, makes the Q10 feel surprisingly well-built.

All of this, of course, is not for the sake of design itself; the phone’s raison d’être is its physical QWERTY keyboard, and it is the most striking part of the device. BlackBerry has traded its old curved keyboard in for the design first prototyped on its limited edition Porsche-branded phone. Now, the keyboard’s four rows stretch from edge to edge in a straight line, with a thin silver band (or fret) separating each row.

Typing feels as good as you’d expect from a company that’s been building tactile keys into small mobile form factors for more than a decade – which is to say, quite good. In fact, most of this review was typed quite comfortably on the device.

For those with big fingers, the keys are also larger and the frets have been made wider for easier delineation between rows. It will take some getting used to for those switching from a fully touch-screen device – the whole point of a tactile keyboard is not typing sloppily, after all – but there’s little for BlackBerry’s long-time QWERTY fans to fear.

More than just a fresh coat of paint

The BlackBerry Q10 runs BlackBerry OS 10.1, an updated version of the operating system found on the Z10 – and naturally, the most interesting changes are specific to the new phone. Instant Actions are especially useful, and allow a user to call contacts, send messages or post tweets by typing commands such as “call,” “txt” or “tweet” from the home screen. It’s a smart way of making better use of the the keyboard for interacting with the UI, instead of solely for rapid communication.