Reference Auto

Research in Motion or RIM has rolled out an affordable BlackBerry of the BB10 series, the Q5, in the country for Rs 24,990 and the styling along with looks of the new phone clearly indicate that RIM is banking on the urban, upwardly mobile youth for ramping up sales of the new handset.

The Q5 has a 3.1-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 720X720 pixels. It is available in Black, Pure White and Pure Red colours. The USP of the new Q5 handset is its touchscreen feature along with the classic Qwerty keypad.

The Q5 smartphone is propelled by a dual-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and 2 GB RAM. 

It comes with an 8 GB internal storage, which can be expanded by up to 32 GB with the help of a microSD card.

The BlackBerry Q5 smartphone is offered with the BlackBerry 10.1 software. The new Q5 smartphone is expected to be available in shops throughout the country from the third week of July.

The phone has a 5-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front shooter. The smartphone also comes with a 2,180 mAh battery, which is a pretty powerful one.

The Q5 is the cheapest of the BB10 series phones launched by the Canadian firm till date, and comes almost for a steal compared to the Z10 and the Q10, which are both priced around Rs 40,000.

“The Q5 comes cheap for the urban youth. It will be available soon at all key BlackBerry outlets in the country and the roll out will be completed by July 20 across India,” said Sunil Lalvani, managing director of BlackBerry for Indian operations, while launching the handset.

The new product, which is a part of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone series, is a data-intensive mobile computing platform. It is a smartphone, which comes with Qwerty keyboard and touchscreen, targeted at the Net savvy city youths.

The Q5 comes just at half the price of the Q10 and is very similar to the latter with the same software. The Q10 feels somewhat heavy with its metal body, but the Q5 (with a plastic body) is lighter but sturdy though and can be more comfortably held compared to the Q10.

BlackBerry burnt the midnight lamp to make the Q5 unique. The keypads are well spaced out (which makes it look rather clumsy compared to the Q10 though) and the design of the Q5 somewhat resembles the Curve series phones.

So, with a dual Querty keypad and high-end smartphone features, the BlackBerry Q5 has been very smartly priced and is mainly targeted at the youth rather that the corporate executive or the entrepreneur.