Blackberry is still making moves in the mobile world in recent months and by the looks of today’s announcement, it is not about to stop. The Blackberry 10 software was announced earlier this year and the company announced its fourth device powered by the software today. The new Blackberry Z30 is the latest smartphone to come from Blackberry and will be taking over for the Z10 as the new flagship device. Earlier this year, Blackberry announced the Z10 and Q10 with the Q5 coming a few months later. The Z10 was the first all touch screen display offered by the company that usually stuck with the full QWERTY keyboard for years.
Guessing that the overall response to the all touch screen Z10 has been good, it looks like Blackberry is comfortable enough to release another device with a touch screen display. The company announced the Z30, which features a larger 5-inch display that comes with a 1280×720 resolution and a quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor from Qualcomm clocked at 1.7Ghz. The Z30 also has a huge battery listed at 2880mAh and that is the largest battery found in any Blackberry smartphone ever made and should provide around 10 hours of continuous usage.
The new Z30 will be running the brand new Blackberry 10.2 software which includes a few new features that are not found with Blackberry 10.1 including enhancements to the Blackberry Hub and improvements to the Blackberry Messenger application that allow you to preview messages that popup on the display. The new Blackberry 10.2 software will be sent out to the three other new Blackberry devices later on next month. The Z30 will be released in the United Kingdom first with other countries coming shortly after that and in time for the holiday shopping season.
Pricing for the new device has not been announced at this time, but if Blackberry wants to compete with other high end devices on the market, it will have to be priced around the $199 to $299 range. Some might be surprised to see the new device announced and released so close to that of the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, but that might have been Blackberry’s intention. While some consumers might see Blackberry as a device lower in the chain than anything Apple makes, the company might be looking to disrupt the iPhone release anyway that it can.
