Chitika is a large online ad agency, and they reported yesterday that the arrival of the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone single-handedly doubled overall traffic generated on BlackBerry mobile devices in its first 20 days of launch. Chitika research shows that their overall ad traffic from BlackBerry mobile devices was a full 5.3% of all traffic, up from 2.65% the day before the BlackBerry Z10 launched. Coupled with earlier than expected sales of 1 million handsets, as well as a commercial order for 1 million units, this comes as great news for BlackBerry shareholders and executives.
The handset officially launched on March 11 in the United States, arriving later on the Verizon and AT&T networks. The newly styled BlackBerry form factor looks like standard Android and iOS powered phones, and the handset delivers a large high-resolution display. Gone is the physical QWERTY keyboard from previous BlackBerries, in place of a totally touchscreen driven user interface. The handset also debuts the brand-new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system for the first time.
The handset was immediately given a $50 discount at select retailers like Amazon, on purchase of a standard two-year contract. The large 4.2 inch LCD screen delivers a high-end resolution of 768 x 1,280 pixels, offering an extremely high pixel density, at 356 pixels over every inch of display space. The handset is slim, measuring just 0.35 inches (9.0 mm). The phone offers visual displays in over 16 million different colors, with standard light and proximity sensors on board to help accentuate battery performance.
This helps the 1,800 mA cell on board the BlackBerry Z10 offer a full 10.0 hours of talk time from a full charge, and the CPU is a dual core 1.5 GHz chip. A full 2.0 GB of RAM memory has been installed, as has 16 GB of internal storage. A microSD slot has been provided for storage expansion, and the system chip is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 package. As with most current handsets, a camera combo is also on board consisting of a rear facing 8.0 megapixel camcorder and front facing 2.0 megapixel chat cam.
A built-in LED flash allows for low light operation, and the camcorder integrates an f/2.2 lens. That rear camera is capable of recording in 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (1,080P HD resolution), and offers autofocus, touch to focus and digital image stabilization features. The new BlackBerry Z10 is NFC capable out-of-the-box, and comes with a built-in music player that filters by album, artist or play list.
