The company formerly known as RIM has pretty much their entire future riding on the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone, and they just got a high-level backer for the device. Debuting the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, the handset recently received praise from the highest levels of security conscious US government officials. The United States Department of Defense (DOD) has officially approved the BlackBerry Z10 for their employees. This means that DOD workers can now chunk out their old BB7 handsets for the Z10 running Enterprise Service 10 with the full blessing of their employers.
Also approved are the BlackBerry Q10 smartphone and PlayBook tablets running BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10. The devices all went through rigorous DOD testing before receiving this security approval, which found the BlackBerry Z10 added to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Unified Communications Approved Product List (UC APL). The BlackBerry Z10 is so important to the future of the company that the Canadian smartphone manufacturer actually changed their name to BlackBerry.
The handset was announced officially in January of this year and hit major US wireless carriers in March, and has been well received at both the commercial and residential shopping levels so far. The radical change in form factor has created a totally touchscreen driven user interface, with a virtual rather than physical keyboard. Gone is the old QWERTY keyboard that was so familiar on older BlackBerries, and replacing it is a new BlackBerry Keyboard virtual edition that actually learns your writing style and helps suggest words to aid you in typing faster and more accurately.
The handset is slim, measuring just 0.35 inches (9.0 mm) in thickness. The BlackBerry Z10 delivers a large 4.2 inch display, and offers 4G LTE connectivity out-of-the-box. NFC wireless support is also present, and the resolution on that multitouch, capacitive touchscreen runs 768 by 1,280 pixels. That means an overall pixel density of 356 pixels per inch, with more than 16 million colors present. The handset can achieve up to 10.0 hours of talk time from a single charge, and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 system chip.
The CPU is a dual core 1.5 GHz chip, and a generous 2.0 GB of RAM memory has been included. The BlackBerry Z10 comes with 16 GB of onboard closet space, and a microSD slot for adding storage. The handset records video at 1,080P HD resolution with the rear facing 8.0 megapixel camcorder, while also providing a front facing chat cam, and can be used as a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot for multiple wireless devices.
