Review: Blackberry Z30 is great if you�re a tweak geek
Decent (IMHO) review posted below (will have to go to link for video and chart of battery life comparison)
Blackberry Z30 is great if you’re a tweak geek
BlackBerry Z30
◾Likes Great sound, great call quality, nice big screen
◾Dislikes One of its best features, the ability to run most Android apps, is deliberately crippled
◾Price $699 (plus labour)
The price tag on BlackBerry’s first 5-inch smartphone, the Z30, reads “$699”. What it should read is “$699 plus labour”.
That’s to account for the time it takes you (or your geeky friend) to tweak the BlackBerry Z30 to turn it into the great phone that it’s capable of being.
I just spent about four hours tweaking it, and I now think the Z30 is terrific, and good value for money for those with the time, patience and technical know-how (or geeky friend) to coax it into shape.
But who has that time? Who wants a phone they have to tweak?
That’s the tragedy of the Z30, and of BlackBerry as a whole. BlackBerry makes fabulous products, but it keeps shooting itself in the foot (or, as it has turned out, the head) with tragic errors.
You see, the BlackBerry Z30, like the last few BlackBerrys, runs an operating system known as BlackBerry 10, and BB10 is a marvellous operating system except for one, probably fatal, flaw: it doesn’t have all your favourite apps.
Only, it does! If you’re willing and able to tweak it, the Z30 has it all! Having spent the best part of an afternoon fiddling with the Z30, I now have all the apps I have been sorely missing on BlackBerry – Spotify, Instagram, Google Maps, Google Earth, XBMC, Locus Pro, Triple Town, Candy Crush Saga – running either perfectly, or, in the case of the games, acceptably well on the phone, and I could scarcely be happier with it.
Results table don’t delete
Insane logic
Between the BlackBerry’s own, first-rate apps such as Browser, Contacts, Calendar, and Hub, and the new apps I have added with a not inconsiderable amount of effort, the Z30 is great. It’s fast, stylish, feature packed and cheap.
It makes me want to find the nearest BlackBerry employees, and throttle the living daylights out of them. Why, when you’re struggling to sell any phones at all, do you have to make it so hard to own one? Can’t you see how insane that is?
To explain: one of the big new features on the Z30 (apart from its big new screen and its big new sound, which I will get to presently) is the fact that it runs a new version of BB10, known as 10.2.
One of BB10.2’s new features is an upgrade to its Android engine, which allows you to run just about any Android app you can think of. (The previous version of BB10 had an old version of Android in it that would run barely any apps.)
Only, when BlackBerry ships the Z30, the Android engine is locked, and it too will barely run anything. You basically have to hack it, installing what’s known as a “developer token”, to unlock it and run Android apps like Spotify and Instagram.
Once you do that, and once you configure your PC to convert Android apps for your newly hacked phone, installing new apps is quick and easy.
Not everything will run – apps such as Google Play Music and Hangouts, that require a Google login, won’t – but 90 per cent of the Android apps I have installed run, and run very well indeed.
Worth the effort
Essentially, a hacked Z30 has all of the benefits of a BlackBerry phone (chiefly, the best messaging there is on a phone, and the best keyboards) with many of the benefits of an Android phone thrown in for good measure.
Why BlackBerry doesn’t ship the phone with an unlocked Android engine, and why it doesn’t set up a website full of Android apps that have been converted for its Android engine, is beyond me. It can’t be for security, as BlackBerry claims, given that the lock can be readily (if not so easily) unlocked.
But if you think you’re up for a bit of tinkering, and if your main use for a smartphone is messaging, web browsing and calls, and if you don’t mind buying into a platform with an uncertain future now that BlackBerry has been sold to private investors, then the Z30 is worth the effort.
It’s not a small phone. It’s big and heavy relative to most other 5-inch phones, making it seem either more premium, or just bigger, depending on your perspective.
I’m one of those in the iPhone-5-is-too-light camp, so I like the heft of the Z30. And between its new, dynamic antenna, which optimises voice and data connections, and its new high-bandwidth voice codecs that offer better call quality than even Skype, it is a genuinely premium phone in a number of respects.
Though not in every respect. Its new, Super AMOLED screen is perhaps not as sharp as it could be – it’s just 1280 x 720 pixels, when competitors are making 5-inch phones with 1920 x 1080 pixels – but it’s sharp enough for the pixels to be invisible to my (slightly ageing) eyes.
The camera on the Z30 is an improvement on the cameras on the Z10 and the Q10, but while it’s easily good enough for photographing receipts and for Instagram, in our tests it proved to be no match for the cameras on Sony, Samsung, Nokia and Apple phones.
This is still a BlackBerry we’re talking about, after all, and as the company confirmed with its recent restructuring, withdrawing itself from the consumer market, BlackBerry is all about work.
It’s just a pity the Z30 makes you do so much work just to make it work properly.