John Chen, the company’s CEO, made the announcement at MIT where he was a keynote presenter.
While still at the peak of the wave of success created by its recently released Passport smartphone, the company has now announced that the BlackBerry Classic Q20 will be available for purchase in December.
This BlackBerry smartphone has been designed to mirror the company’s most popular handsets, with a QWERTY keyboard.
The BlackBerry Classic Q20 will not only feature the popular keyboard made out of actual keys as opposed to a touchscreen, but it will also offer a function key “belt” row, which will provide the menu, call, back, and end buttons as well as the trackpad. The device, itself, hasn’t entirely come as a surprise to many mobile technology news followers, as the specs for the device had already leaked online.
The biggest news from the announcement was that the BlackBerry Classic Q20 will be ready for sale in December.
Chen made the announcement in Hong Kong at the MIT Enterprise Forum, where he was a keynote presenter. He took the opportunity to underscore the accomplishments of BlackBerry within the mobile technology environment, focusing specifically on the recent achievements, such as the BBM expansion, the Z3 launch, and the fact that it has made its software cross-platform.
A month before the Classic is set to launch, there will also be another official launch from the company. On November 13, the company intends to release the BES12, which was described by Chen as being a version of the Bold 9900, but that has “a little more power”.
Both the BES12 and the BlackBerry Classic Q20 appear to be an attempt by the handset maker to draw from the successes of its past but to make them applicable for the present. Neither one of these devices will be completely revolutionary or vastly unique, as was the case in the shape of the Passport, which is square. Instead, it is meant to appeal to those who became very familiar with what the company has previously had to offer, and who genuinely preferred those features. According to Chen, the Classic is going to be “crafted from premium materials and designed for reliability and durability.” Its display will be 3.5 inches and it will have a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, with 2 GB of RAM, an 8 MP camera with a 2 MP front facing camera, a 2515 mAh battery. Its weight is 178 grams.
