The much-awaited BlackBerry Q20, also known as BlackBerry Classic, will finally have its official launch on December 17 in New York, Frankfurt and Singapore simultaneously. It was also announced by BlackBerry's CEO John Chen during last week's launch of BES 12 that they are now open for pre-orders of the said device.
BlackBerry Classic is expected to sell even better than the the high-end BlackBerry Passport, which is currently getting good reviews from users. The 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.
Meanwhile, CEO Chen is reportedly seeking market growth in China. He has recently met with Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun, and Lenovo's head Yang Yuanqing along with Cher Wang, chairwoman of Taoyuan, Taiwan-based HTC Corp, during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in Beijing. "It does seem that a more efficient way is to have a good partner to be here," Chen said in an interview. "I'm here this time to look at what opportunities there may be. We have not really focused on this market. It's a huge market but it's a very highly competitive market too."
"What I'm doing is to explore what is the right approach to the market given what we do well and I'm not shutting any doors," Chen said. "This market is not an easy one to get deals done quickly. It's going to take a while, but I'm interested."
