BlackBerry Leap smartphone is a 5-inch full-touch smartphone for which the company says it is aimed at the young power professionals. Marketing talk aside, this is a nice mid-range phone. If you like BlackBerry.
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BlackBerry Leap comes with a 5-inch 720p full-touch display with Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 chipset with Adreno 225 GPU and 2GB of RAM memory. The Leap packs 16GB of internal storage that is expandable by up to 128GB via a microSD card. It features the BlackBerry OS 10.3.1-running smartphone comes with an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera.
BlackBerry Leap is powered by a 2800mAh battery, which, BlackBerry claims, can offer up to 25 hours of "mixed usage". The smartphone is compatible with FDD-LTE Band 3 that is likely to be used by some operators in the future. The Leap is a younger brother of the Z3 and it looks similar to it. The design is OK, it's not ugly but nothing spectacular here, the good point is a textured back which makes gripping and working with the phone easy.
The company added the Amazon app store natively so you can get Android apps from there if you like or are used to Android apps because you just switched from the Android platform. (Hardly, but possible.) So, what to think about all those specifications? First, a huge touch screen is something we are used to and we believe it is better to have a big screen than a physical keyboard, no matter how good it may be. Second, we don't see why "young power professionals" choose this device over Android or iPhone.
Then, the Amazon store is not the best possible place to find Android apps and this is a) good news from the corporate point of view and b) bad news if you want to install something interesting. And, as a conclusion, BlackBerry is still BlackBerry: the machine made to send and receive mails, and for other interesting stuff... well, there are other phones for that. So, should you buy one? No. If you are in a big company you might get one, but we definitively don't recommend spending any money on the Leap. ■
