After the Passport's disaster both in design and usability, BlackBerry announced that it is returning to the past. The BlackBerry Classic is the new device for which the company is expecting to bring back corporate users.
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The Classic has a classic look, something that will bring you back in time, a full QWERTY physical keyboard, and physical navigation keys. There is nothing new in the design to such extent that you can easily confuse it with one of the old models. No older, but old. Luckily, as it it, it is still much better then unhappy Passport. The Classic is obviously a device for one hand and it aims to bring back old BlackBerry users used to this kind of device for their corporate needs.
The Classic has a 720 x 720 pixel, 3.5-inch touchscreen, a true square, above the keyboard and navigation keys. This is a bit smaller than the screen on the Passport, and much smaller than the displays we used to see and use on modern smartphones. So, you have the physical QWERTY keyboard and the screen all in one but after a day with a decent bigger smartphone the Classic's screen is not something spectacular at all.
The heart of the old/new BlackBerry is a dual-core Qualcomm processor from 2012 with 2GB of working memory. Sound enough for corporate users and too little for anybody else. Or to put it this way: BlackBerry expects you to send and receive mails all day long and that's about it. Forget new mobile games and things like that, work is what you have to do, no fun! The Classic runs BlackBerry 10 OS which offers productivity tools like well-known Hub, Assistant, and Blend. It can run Android apps, which are accessible through the Amazon App Store.
To improve a smartphone, well, that's always a good idea. To improve the thing from the past? This is a clear sign that BlackBerry have no idea where the telecom sector is going. The company is trying to bring back to life good all times but it's better to remember them then to live in them again. ■
