And so we were right when we said that BlackBerry CEO John Chen will definitely make an announcement during the recently held BES 12 conference regarding the highly-anticipated release date of the BlackBerry Q20, also known as Blackberry Classic.
CEO Chen has announced that the Classic's official launch is set on December 17 in 3 host cities- New York, Singapore and Frankfurt. Another good news is BlackBerry fans can now pre-order the new BlackBerry Classic via its official online store, ShopBlackBerry. The device will be initially available in the U.S. priced at $449, and U.K. having a price of £349. According to the listing in the online store, shipping starts in mid-December.
Moreover, as revealed by CEO Chen during the conference, it will only be available in GSM version meantime, which denotes it will not work on Verizon, Sprint or US Cellular. There has been no contract signing with a carrier involved as well.
BlackBerry Classic is expected to sell even better than the the high-end BlackBerry Passport, which is currently getting good reviews from users. Although there are no official images yet of the BB Q20, there have been leaked photos of the said device which has been circling the internet the past months. According to the leaked images, BB Q20 is said to be bringing back the physical navigation keys and trackpad just like its forerunners. It takes back the "belt," just above the QWERTY keyboard, because users of the Q10 were looking for this feature. The keyboard stretches from edge to edge along the bottom of the phone which makes the typing experience way better as the keyboard is now easier to use. It has a 3.5 inch screen that will also be square, with 1,440 x 1,440 pixels screen resolution and a 582 ppi pixel density. It gives a wide display of 60 characters, making the webpage viewing pleasurable and reading documents much easier. It has a dual core processor at 1.5 GHz with a 2GB RAM, and a long lasting 2,525 mAh battery. It can now support NFC and 4G LTE. It is rumored to be running Blackberry 10.3 OS, supposedly an unreleased OS. Furthermore, the new Blackberry Classic is believed to be the thinnest handset Blackberry has ever produced having a dimension of 130 x 72 x 9mm.Based on the leaked prototype images, it appears to have stereo speakers and external nano-SIM or microSD card slots.
Stay tuned for the much-awaited Classic launch finally happening next month!
