Nobody does keyboards like BlackBerry. At this point, almost nobody does keyboards except BlackBerry, which makes the BlackBerry Passport —and now the new BlackBerry Classic—the go-to phones for people who still want to mash some physical buttons. The Classic ($449) has the more traditional keyboard of the two, and it fits beautifully in a businessperson's hand. Still, though, we recommend the more powerful Passport to get your work done, as the Classic's sluggish performance was a bit of a downer.

We received our BlackBerry Classic a few days before the company's Dec. 17 launch event, and the unlocked model is going on sale now, but U.S. carriers declined to give us a firm release date before the event.

Physical Features

The BlackBerry Classic looks as much like a BlackBerry Bold 9900 as it is possible to, while still having a decently sized touch screen. At 5.15 by 2.85 by 0.4 inches (HWD), it's just barely a one-handed phone, especially if you're a man with larger hands; unlike with the BlackBerry Passport, you'll be able to type one-handed on this keyboard.

And the keyboard is back. The real keyboard, not the Passport's New Coke keyboard with the space bar jammed into the middle of the bottom row of letters. The Classic has a four-row QWERTY with physical pickup, hang-up, menu, and back buttons and a trackpad above it, just like a BlackBerry from 2008. The keys are also genuinely clicky. Some people have complained about the Passport's keyboard being a touch mushy; these are not mushy.

This is obviously going to please old-school BlackBerry owners, because even the weird little tics are still here, like the way the number keys are arranged in a square over the left hand side of the keyboard. (The photo below shows the Passport on the left, and the Classic on the right.)

Not being a total BlackBerry fanatic, I feel like some of the old-school touches are just a touch redundant. The touchpad, for instance, is mapped to let you move around the touch screen. It's genuinely useful for cursor control when editing text, but it feels a little silly in an overall BlackBerry 10 interface that's geared towards broad gestures such as swipes. The menu button also feels a little like it's there just to be there.

The Classic is a heavy 6.24 ounces, but like an old Bold, it feels solid and premium, with a textured back and attractive, matte bezel. The 720-by-720, 3.5-inch LCD is sharp and gets extremely bright; it's quite readable outdoors. At 290ppi, it's not nearly as precise as the Passport's amazing 453ppi screen, but I had zero trouble reading even small text. There are microSD and nano SIM card slots on the left side; you need a SIM removal tool to access either of them. On the right side, there are well-spaced, hard volume buttons and a dedicated BlackBerry Assistant voice command button.

Call Quality, Reception, and Battery

You know phone calls are going to be a priority when a phone has physical pickup and hang-up buttons. This is awesome, if you make a lot of calls—you always, always have one-touch access to the dialer.

BlackBerry is currently the leader in call quality, in part thanks to its excellent Paratek antennas. Calls on the Classic, just like on the Passport, sounded excellent, clear and full. Signal strength was terrific in my tests. The microphone did a good job of eliminating street noise. The bottom-ported speakerphone isn't stunningly loud, but it's loud enough to hear outdoors, and the microphone there also transmits voices very clearly. Needless to say, performance with Bluetooth headsets is also excellent.

BlackBerry gave me a model of the Classic with an AT&T SIM that accesses the AT&T LTE network, but couldn't provide me with a spec sheet with accurate frequency bands. The company said there would be both GSM and CDMA versions of the Classic, which means it will come in separate models for the various U.S. carriers. AT&T confirmed it will carry the Classic.

Other wireless specs are just barely acceptable. The Classic has 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, but not newer technologies like 802.11ac or 802.11r. There's GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth, of course, though the spec sheet lists Bluetooth 4.0 without LE. But LE is for wearables and I can't think of any BlackBerry-compatible wearables anyway.

Battery life is excellent. I got a terrific 11 hours, 21 minutes streaming video on one charge of the sealed-in 2,515mAh battery, and later managed not to charge it for a weekend and it was just fine. The small screen really helps.

OS and Apps

I discussed BlackBerry 10.3 in my review of the BlackBerry Passport. Out of the box, it has a lot going for it. It's easy to set up with almost any e-mail system, delivering e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and text alerts with alacrity. DocumentsToGo makes excellent work of attachments, the Web browser shows you desktop-style pages, and the BlackBerry Blend desktop software lets you use your handheld as a VPN device for your PC. BlackBerry 10.3.1 adds a lot of thoughtful little features, extending things like out-of-office message support, PDF form support, and calendar snooze options.

But the third-party app situation for BlackBerry 10.3 continues to be horrible. It isn't just about games; let's entirely ignore games, although they're the most popular overall category of third-party apps. The two app stores BlackBerry includes, BlackBerry World and the Amazon Appstore, tend to lack or have underfeatured versions of critical, important apps. While the Classic is compatible with most Android 4.3 apps, having no Google Play Store or Google services on board turns out to be a major minus.

For instance, I tried to download a series of airline and social networking apps from the two app stores. I rely on Delta, United, and the business travel agency Egencia's app, all of which are supposedly available. Instagram and Google Hangouts are not available at all, although Vine is. There are third-party apps with limited subsets of Instagram and Google features. The Delta app and Egencia app both lack core features available on the standard Android versions. (I also found this in September, when BlackBerry told me they were working on fixing this; two months later, no dice.) And the whole Amazon Appstore experience was much more sluggish than on the powerful Passport phone—sometimes apps took more than a minute to install, and I wondered if the Appstore had crashed.

What's especially frustrating is that better versions of some of these apps run just fine on the Classic. If you download the Delta Air Lines or Egencia apps from Google Play on a different Android phone, and use a kludgy process to upload and install the apps' APK files on the Classic, you get the full experience. But you shouldn't have to do that, and installing random APKs on your BlackBerry goes against the whole principles of simplicity and security that BlackBerry is promoting.

Other apps are simply incompatible. There's no way to get Google Hangouts onto the BlackBerry without some serious hacking. Most of my benchmarks just crashed, including relatively simple ones like Geekbench.

Performance also lacks. A game as simple as the puzzle game Quell Memento stuttered. Another celebrated puzzler, Monument Valley, took a stunning 47 seconds to launch, as compared to a sprightly 13 seconds on a Google Nexus 5. Throughout the interface, I sometimes had to stab the camera or speakerphone button twice to get them to respond, and the Amazon Appstore app had lag all over it.

The BlackBerry 10.3 OS might be a little too much for the 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 processor in here. The MSM8960, also known as the Snapdragon S4 Plus, also uses an older Adreno 225 GPU. It first hit the market in 2012. It's all very weak compared with the Blackberry Passport's quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 801, and the few benchmarks I was actually able to run tell the tale. The Classic scored a 17,817 on the Antutu overall system benchmark and a 663 on Browsermark. The Passport couldn't run Antutu, but got a 977 on Browsermark, a nearly 50 percent difference. Current high-end Android phones get between 35,000 and 45,000 on Antutu and 1,300-1,500 on Browsermark.

In real-world browser testing, I saw the same gap between the Passport and Classic that I saw on benchmarks. BlackBerry 10.3 has a terrific Web browser. But page loads were noticeably slower on the Classic. With our own home page, on the Passport it took 9.4 seconds. On the Classic, 17 seconds.

Next Page: Multimedia and Conclusions

Multimedia and Conclusions

Multimedia

The 8-megapixel main camera is pretty good in decent light; it snaps sharp photos quickly. The strong flash could really light up a small room. The video mode purports to capture 1080p videos at 30 frames per second or 720p videos at 60 frames per second, but I found it inconsistent. One of my outdoor videos, in daylight, only tallied up to 25 frames per second. Indoors, the autofocus had some trouble—once I tapped to focus, it was fine.

The 2-megapixel front-facing camera didn't live up to the promise of its rear-facing sibling. Outdoors, I saw crazy white-balance errors. Indoors, low shutter speeds made for very soft photos. 720p video was smooth at 30 frames per second, though.

BlackBerry offers several ways to get media onto and off of your phone. The 16GB phone has about 13GB free by default, and you sync media through the free BlackBerry Link app (at right), either over a USB cable or Wi-Fi. There's also a microSD card slot, which worked fine with our 64GB card—I used that for media and to move over Android apps from my other Android phone.

Music and video playback are standard here for BlackBerry devices. This isn't the ideal phone to watch videos on, as they letterbox on the square screen and as a result, appear quite small. Spotify and Pandora are available in the Amazon Appstore, but video services are weak: There's no Netflix, no HBO Go, no Amazon Music or Video. Entertainment just doesn't seem to be a priority. I understand this is a work phone, but entertainment apps really help during long flight delays.

The Classic, like the Passport, supports both SlimPort HDMI cables and Qualcomm's wireless Miracast streaming to mirror its display to TVs. That could be for showing presentations on a big screen, but I've also used it to show YouTube videos from the browser on a big screen.

Conclusions

I love one-handed phones, and I quite like keyboards, so you'd think that the BlackBerry Classic would be right up my alley. But it has some of the same problems as the equally attractive BlackBerry Q10 ($169.99 at Amazon) did: It's really suffering when it comes to performance and apps.

I'd love to use the Classic for work, but the lack of Google Hangouts is a deal breaker in our business, and having to install my business-critical travel apps bootlegged off of a separate Android phone is just ridiculous.

I'm rating this phone a bit higher than I would have otherwise, because there are so few keyboarded phones left out there. The Classic works well for its basic, built-in uses of phone calls, calendar, and secure messaging—what every BlackBerry has been built for since 2003—but it fails if you need much more than that. If you're interested in the BlackBerry experience, and you want to get work done in a big way, go big. Get a Passport.

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