Huawei P9 review

Pros

• Dual lens tech is great
• Solid performance
• Decent battery life
• Super fast fingerprint scanner

Cons

• EMUI skin is heavy
• Camera software can be fidlly

Key Features

• Dual lens camera setup
• Kirin CPU
• 3GB RAM
• 5.2-inch FHD display
• 3000mAh battery
• Android Marshmallow with EMUI
• Manufacturer: Huawei
• Review Price: £449.00

Huawei P9 long-term review: The camera’s still great but the phone has begun to slow down

Long-term review by Richard Easton
Three months on since the Huawei P9 launched, I’ve been using the handset as my main phone day in and day out. It’s meant I’ve gotten a real feel for the good and bad parts of Huawei’s current flagship smartphone.
The camera is still the best part of the package, even if Huawei has been caught being rather misleading in just how good it is. I’ve taken photos that have rivalled the best handsets out there. I haven’t used the monochrome-only mode as often once the novelty wore off, but the added contrast and punch is certainly still welcome. I’ve also rarely ever had the patience to use the Pro shooting modes, but the regular Auto setting has served me well enough.
While the P9 survived Alastair’s initial drop test, it didn’t fare quite so favourably for me when dropped onto the hard tile surface of a swimming pool changing room. A chip across the chamfered bottom corner now acts as a reminder of my clumsiness. Aside from the cosmetic damage, the P9 was otherwise fine.
I’ve noticed some performance degradation over the past few months. Apps can be noticeably slower to load than when the P9 was fresh out of its box, which can be frustrating. Worse is when it happens with the Camera app as it’s resulted in some missed opportunities.
Huawei’s slightly intrusive power firewall also hasn’t seemed to help with performance issues nor with battery performance, either. I’m a heavy WhatsApp user throughout the day, as well as checking in on what’s happening with Twitter and Instagram probably more often than I should. I also stream music on Spotify during my commute. Under that usage scenario the P9 still does get me to the evening but it can cut it very fine.
Huawei’s EMUI Android customisation is still one of the phone’s biggest weaknesses, as such I’ve been using the Google Now launcher in its place. Even with an alternative launcher, you still can’t escape some of the more niggling aspects of Huawei’s UI, such as the notification pane and lockscreen. You get used to many of the P9’s oddities over time, but it’s still not ideal.
Three months on, the P9 remains Huawei’s best phone to date. It’s still a generally lovely smartphone and a good candidate for those not wanting to stretch to the higher flagship prices, but it is unfortunately still hampered by shoddy software.

What is the Huawei P9?

Since the arrival of the Nokia 808 PureView manufacturers have been battling ever harder to create the very finest phone camera. We've seen everything from mainstream adoption of optical image stabilisation to custom technologies like LG’s laser autofocus and HTC’s Ultrapixels – which reappeared on the new HTC 10.
The P9 is Huawei’s stab at the title and sees the firm team up with photography legend Leica to create what it’s calling “the ultimate camera-phone”.
It features a nifty dual-lens rear camera setup similar to the one Apple’s rumoured to be working on for its fabled iPhone 7, and there’s definitely some truth to Huawei's claim. But be warned, its custom imaging software shares some of proper Leica cameras' “eccentricities”. This, combined with ongoing issues with Huawei's EMUI Android skin, make the P9 a good, but not great, smartphone.

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Huawei P9 – Design

2016 has been a great year for Android fans, and seen the release of some of the prettiest smartphones ever. Highlights have included the super-swish Samsung Galaxy S7, the awesomely metal HTC 10 and the modular LG G5.
The P9 stands alongside these stellar handsets on the design front and is the best-looking smartphone Huawei’s ever made. It has an undeniable iPhone 6S-ish feel, featuring a unibody metal chassis with flat sides. The metal, combined with the P9’s almost bezel-free display gives the phone a feel that's on par with any 2016 flagship I’ve tested.
Huawei’s also loaded the P9 with a decent portfolio of connectivity. At its bottom you’ll find a USB Type-C port, and along its long right-hand side you’ll find a Nano SIM and microSD card slot. The microSD will let you add a further 128GB of space to the phone’s inbuilt 32GB/64GB. But be warned, if you’re planning on taking advantage of the microSD, the P9 doesn’t support Android Marshmallow's Adoptable Storage feature.
Adoptable Storage lets you instruct your phone to treat SD card storage like native storage – meaning you can do things like install apps directly to the SD card. On past handsets, such as the HTC One A9, I’ve found the feature massively helpful, as it let me walk around with my entire music and games library downloaded with space to spare.
There's a good reason why Huawei, and other phone makers including Samsung and LG, are turning Adoptable Storage off. Running Adoptable Storage means you can’t swap the SD card out without damaging/impacting the smartphone’s performance. Using a cheap SD card will also hamper the phone’s overall performance, so Huawei’s decision is understandable, albeit a little disappointing in my mind.

Outside of this, Huawei’s loaded the P9 with a Level 4 fingerprint scanner on its back. Huawei claims the scanner is a marked step up from the Level 3 scanners seen on competing phones and will be noticeably faster and more accurate than competitors.
I didn’t notice much of a difference between it and competing fingerprint scanners like the ones seen on the Galaxy S7 or Nexus 5X. But this isn’t an issue and the scanner is still more than good enough. It's super-fast and the only times it failed to recognise my fingerprint was when I was using the phone in rain, or had dirty hands.
Huawei’s also made it so you can use the scanner to enact some basic commands. The controls are activated in the phone’s settings menu and let you do things like pull down the notification panel and scroll through photos by swiping on the scanner. The feature sounds minor, but I found myself using the scanner to check incoming alerts on a regular basis after only a couple of days with the P9.
Build quality is solid. Drop testing it on my wooden kitchen floor, the Huawei P9 survived crack- and chip-free. Though the body's metal does feel slightly more flimsy than the alloy used on the HTC 10, and can be prone to picking up dirt marks.
The phone’s also not as comfortable to hold as the Galaxy S7 or HTC 10. Its miniscule 7mm thickness, combined with its flat sides, can make it feel slightly slippery – which will be an issue for clumsy users who regularly drop their phones.

Huawei P9 – Display

To spec-heads the Huawei P9’s 5.2-inch display isn’t anything to write home about. The FHD 1080 x 1920 resolution puts it well behind competing smartphones such as the Galaxy S7, which generally have cornea-slicingly sharp QHD 2560 x 1440 resolutions. But being honest, with everyday use I didn’t have any serious complaints about the screen.
There’s been a lot of debate about when the human eye stops being able to tell the difference between resolutions. Some people say it’s when we break the 300ppi (pixels per inch) density milestone, while others think we can spot the difference past 500 ppi. Whatever the truth of the matter, I found the P9’s 423ppi display more than sharp enough. Icons and text are universally sharp and pleasingly free of any signs of pixelation.


The use of LCD screen technology ensures blacks are nicely deep and colours have a good amount of pop, without looking over-saturated. The phone’s colour temperature setting also makes it quick and easy to adjust it to meet your personal preference.
White levels are slightly muddy compared to competing handsets, but are far from terrible, and viewing angles, while not the best I’ve seen, are suitably wide. All in all, the P9’s screen isn’t the best around – that title goes jointly to those on the Galaxy S7 and HTC 10 – but it’s more than fit for purpose. 99% of people will have no issue with it.

Huawei P9 – Software

Huawei’s insistence on loading its God-awful Emotion skin onto handsets has been a constant problem. I’ve never liked Android skins, as they generally add bloatware, make needless changes to Android’s now excellent user interface and delay how quickly devices can get upgraded to new versions of the OS.
Despite Huawei having actively worked to tone down EMUI, the skin is still guilty of at least two of these sins and is, in my mind, one of the worst available.
For starters, the OS reworks Android’s user interface to the point that it’s all but unrecognisable. Android’s app tray has disappeared, so all installed applications are now displayed on the phone’s home screens, the same way they are on iOS. Useful shortcuts, like the torchlight in Quick Settings, have also been inexplicable removed. This makes the UI feel alien to even the most seasoned Android user. Considering Android Marshmallow’s awesome Material Design, I can’t help but feel Huawei’s making changes for the sake of it.
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Hats off to Huawei for reducing the amount of bloatware on EMUI in recent years, but there’s still more of it than I’d like. Out of the box the phone still runs duplicate Huawei apps that offer either equivalent, or inferior, services to Android’s native versions. Key offenders include the messaging, calendar, email and gallery apps. I’d really like Huawei to take a page out of the HTC 10’s book and stop loading duplicate apps onto its handsets.
It’s too early to say if my third issue with Android skins will repeat itself on the P9. To know we’ll have to wait and see how quickly it gets upgraded to the final version of Android N later this year – though given Huawei’s poor track record with software updates I don’t have high hopes.
It’s easy enough to ditch EMUI using a launcher, such as the official Google Now launcher, but it’s still a faff, as the apps and useless features will still be there eating up storage and memory.

Huawei P9 – Performance

I may not be a big believer in Huawei’s software, but I have nothing but respect for its hardware. Past phones powered by Huawei’s Kirin chips have offered excellent performance.
With real-world us I found this remains true on the P9. The P9 is smooth to use 99% of the time. It glides between menu screens and launches applications in milliseconds. I found the P9 plays intensive 3D games, like Riptide GP3, chug- and stutter-free – though prolonged gaming did on occasion cause the phone to heat up, and lead to instances of CPU throttling.
Unlike past phones running EMUI I’m also yet to experience any unexpected application crashes on the Huawei P9. Outside of a few small bugs causing occasional stutters I haven’t noticed any serious issues with the P9’s performance.

My real world impressions rang true when I put the P9 through Trusted's standard series of synthetic benchmark tests.
On AnTuTu, which offers a general measure of a phones’ performance, the P9 scored a respectable 98,008. This puts it well above the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810-powered Nexus 6P, but behind competing Snapdragon 820 handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S7. The Nexus 6P scored 50,030 while the Galaxy S7 scored 129,468 by comparison.
The P9’s Geekbench score was a little more interesting. The P9 ran in with respectable 1,750 single-core and 6,281 multi-core scores. The multi-core score is particularly impressive and puts the phone on a par with the Galaxy S7, which scored 6,307 on Geekbench and means the P9 should be great at multitasking.
Gaming performance is less promising. On the GPU-intensive 3DMark Sling Shot benchmark the P9 scored 966. This puts it below most 2016 flagships – the Galaxy S7 scored 2,129 on the same test.

Huawei P9 – Camera

The Huawei P9’s dual-lens Leica camera setup is without doubt its most interesting feature. During the P9’s launch Huawei made so many grandiose claims about the camera that my laptop keyboard all but melted as I manically tried to type them all down.
The big central point is that Leica helped create the camera hardware and software. For non-photography types, Leica is a powerhouse camera brand that has a strong track record of producing premium and ludicrously expensive snappers, and was the company that popularised 35mm film.
Specs-wise the camera rig is pretty impressive. Each of the cameras has a 12-megapixel Sony IMX286 sensor, an LED flash and hybrid autofocus. The only difference between the two is that one sensor is set to capture monochrome images, while the other captures the RGB (colour) spectrum.
Huawei claims the dual setup will help the camera pull off all manner of snazzy shot types and radically improve low-light performance – apparently the black-and-white sensor can capture as much as 300% more light than regular smartphone cameras.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389d0/df3b_orh616w616/huawei-p9-3.jpg
According to Huawei the dual sensor also means the P9 is the first phone in the world that will be able to capture a “professional Bokeh effect”. That's the funky-looking aesthetic that a camera creates from heavily out-of-focus areas of the frame.
Ordinarily I’d have taken all these claims with a pretty big dose of salt – after all HTC made pretty much the exact set of claims when it unveiled its UltraPixel tech on the original One. But because of Leica’s hand in the P9 camera hardware and design I was a little more optimistic.
After a fortnight with the device I can confirm the P9 is capable of taking great photos that match, if not beat, those from the Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6S on quality. But getting the most out of the P9 can be tricky.
The auto setting works fine in regular light 90% of the time, but at times suffers from a few weird quirks. Pictures are all more than usable, but I noticed the camera has a tendency to add a subtle vignette effect. The camera also sometimes struggles with exposures in bright conditions, resulting in unbalanced images with slightly inaccurate, exaggerated contrast levels.
The weird anomalies likely stem from the dual-camera tech working a little too well and came as a slight surprise. Outside of the dual-lens tech, the P9’s cameras fall behind some competing top-end camera phones, like the Galaxy S7 and HTC 10, on two key areas – pixel size and aperture.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389d8/2b0a_orh616w616/huawei-p9-11.jpg
In auto mode photos can take on a reddish tinge
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389da/0210_orh616w616/huawei-p9-13.jpg
But they generally look really good
The P9 sensors have 1.25μm-size pixels and the lenses have a solid, but not best-in-class, f/2.2 aperture. As a rule of thumb a bigger μm and wider aperture (lower f-number) mean the camera sensor will be able to capture more light and perform better in darker situations. The Galaxy S7 has an f/1.7 aperture and captures 1.4µm pixels while the HTC 10 has an f/1.8 aperture and captures gigantic 1.55µm-sized “UltraPixels”.
I also had some issues with the colours. Reds in particular on occasion came out far too strong and ruined otherwise well-balanced shots when I was using the automatic mode.
Low-light performance is solid, but not the best I’ve seen on a smartphone. Images taken in dim conditions are good enough to share on social media. But the moment you even moderately blow them up on a large screen you’ll begin to notice noise and pixelation – though being fair this happens on pretty much every smartphone I test.
Luckily the majority of these issues can be fixed if you take advantage of the phone’s robust selection of shot modes and manual controls.
The P9 offers a range of 14 shooting modes. These include standard options, like High Dynamic Range and Panorama, as well as Huawei’s custom Light Painting, Beauty, Video, Bokeh and Monochrome options.
All the standard shot modes work a treat. The Panorama mode in particular is a highlight and among the best I’ve tested – unlike on competing handsets the mode is pretty stable and generally doesn’t end up with any overlapping or tears in photos.
Huawei’s Light Painting and Monochrome modes are also fun and make it easy for non-photographers to take artsy-ish shots in low light. The settings instruct the camera to continue shooting until the user manually tells it to stop. The resulting effect is an artistic photo showing moving light – like a long-exposure photo from a DSLR.
The Monochrome mode also performed far better than competing rivals. Black-and-white images close to universally had great contrast levels and a suitably noir feel.
Others are a little hit and miss. The Beauty mode remains a strange beast that doesn’t really have a place on the western market. It’s a feature that’s designed to make people in photos look prettier, but from what I’ve seen it does little more than increase people’s eye size and flatten their skin tone. Testing the mode on several of the Trusted team, the results were... interesting.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389d9/7947_orh616w616/huawei-p9-12.jpg
I don't normally look like Gollum, honest.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389de/2519_orh616w616/huawei-p9-17.jpg
And Max definitley isn't this boyband-ish in real life

image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389df/022c_orh616w616/huawei-p9-18.jpg
Nor is Joe this dead behind the eyes (except in meetings)
The Bokeh shot mode also isn’t as perfect as Huawei claims. It brings up a slider that lets you digitally adjust the sensor’s aperture. At anything but its lowest setting the mode is too extreme and will bring up blurry anomalies and inconsistencies. It's still the best I’ve seen on a smartphone, though, and it easily outperforms the versions I’ve tested on past Samsung and HTC phones. If you are careful and use it sparingly you can produce some nice macro shots.
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Maxed out, the bokeh effect can really punish inaccurate focusing
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389dd/159b_orh616w616/huawei-p9-16.jpg
But if used subtly it can be useful
Generally, though, I got better results using the phone’s Pro camera mode. The Pro mode is accessed by swiping up from a small on-screen bar at the bottom of the camera app’s UI. It offers manual control over key settings such as focus, ISO, shutter speed, exposure and white balance. Using it I created much better low-light shots and more realistic bokeh effects – though this requires more time and a little technical knowledge to take advantage of.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389ef/d8b1_orh616w616/blackandwhitehuaweip9.jpg
Black and white photos can look stunningThe front-facing 8-megapixel rear camera is also more than good enough for taking selfies and video calling. Though again I’d recommend giving the Beauty mode a miss.

Huawei P9 – Battery

Smartphones' battery lives haven’t evolved at the same rate as their other qualities. To date most smartphones struggle to constantly last more than one to two days off a single charge. The Huawei P9 doesn’t change this trend, but it’s no worse than most competing handsets, including the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5 and HTC 10.
With regular use I usually got around one to one and a half day's use out of the phone’s non-removable Li-Ion 3400mAh battery. Regular use entailed taking and making a few calls, chatting on Hangouts throughout the day, sporadically checking my email and social media feeds, watching a couple of YouTube videos and intermittent music listening.
image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389cf/722d_orh616w616/huawei-p9-2.jpg
The phone also dealt fairly well with demanding tasks like video streaming and gaming. Watching Netflix over my lunch break with the screen on 60% brightness the P9 lost 12-15% of its charge, which is pretty standard for a 2016 flagship. Gaming took a bigger toll on the battery. Playing Riptide GP2 the phone lost 15-23% of its charge per hour, which is again normal.
The inclusion of fast charging support also makes it quick and easy to top up the phone’s battery. During my entire time using the P9 it never took more than an hour to fully charge, when connected to a powerful enough plug.
Related: Best smartphone 2016

image: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/0000389d3/2776_orh616w616/huawei-p9-6.jpg

Should I buy the Huawei P9?

The P9 is the best Huawei phone to date. The Leica-branded camera may not fully deliver on Huawei’s claims, but it’s still as good, if not better than, most competing phone cameras.
The P9 doesn’t quite match competing handsets, such as the Galaxy S7, when it comes to its other hardware, but with a £449 starting price it’s over £100 cheaper than its key rivals. The phone’s nippy performance, robust build quality, and solid battery life mean it will meet most users’ needs.
Were it not for the reappearance of Huawei’s EMUI Android skin – which, apart from the LG G5’s UX 5.0, is probably the worst on the market – I’d happily recommend the P9 as a great choice for any smartphone buyer looking for a good deal.

Suicide Squad Review

Superhero movies typically focus on the "good guys" fighting some irredeemable and malevolent force--the kind that's easy to hate. Suicide Squad takes that narrative in a different direction. It's still an exciting roller coaster ride full of glitz and predictable set-piece moments, but this isn't the sort of comic book movie you're probably expecting. It's better.

Set in a post-Batman v Superman world, the nation’s leaders are concerned about the growing threat of metahumans. But the world's leadership is equally unsure who can protect them from the massive world-destroying abominations the super-powered beings have been fighting. Enter high-ranking government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis): she proposes the invocation of a team of super-villains to fight other super-powered enemies. Problem solved.

Suicide Squad introduces an ensemble cast of comic book characters that the general movie-going audience has likely never heard of--save the Joker--but writer/director David Ayer handles this brilliantly. Like the film's well-received trailers, Suicide Squad mixes comic-influenced imagery with familiar songs to create catchy themes for each character. Tonally, it sets Suicide Squad apart from other comic book films while also keeping it grounded in the familiar.

Once the introductions are over, the music is toned down, and the action ramps up. You can't expect a group called a "suicide squad" to face anything less than the threat of death at every moment. But that sense of imminent sacrifice also forces you to see the team in a different light. Over the course of the film, the individuals become more than simple one-dimensional villains forced to fight a massive, even eviler force. They're still bad guys, but they're bad guys you can root for.

One of the primary reasons the villains work so well comes down to the massive talents that portray them. Will Smith eschews his normally light-hearted demeanor to embody the somber Deadshot, a role he takes on with the same skill as some of his heavier character-driven work. Jared Leto gives us a Joker like we've never seen before. His Joker is as ruthless as you would expect, but you'll be surprised with how he runs his operations. His dynamic with Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn runs contrary to what some traditionalists may expect. Robbie also does an excellent job handling the complexity of Harley's mental instability without making it feel over-the-top or out-of-place. Not every character gets the same deep dive into their motivations, but this make it feel like there's more material to broach in the inevitable sequel.

If there's a weak point to Suicide Squad, it's the inconsistent pacing. After the introduction concludes and the mission begins, it's almost as if you're thrown into a separate movie. The film then starts to yo-yo between frenetic action highs and slower dialogue-heavy moments, but it never brings them together seamlessly. And the mix of realistic-looking action juxtaposed against late-movie CGI-heavy moments feels jarring. The CGI does work in those scenes. It just feels a little out of place with the rest of the movie. When the climax of the movie occurs, you'll probably have a good idea how things will play out.

Despite the mostly predictable ending, Suicide Squad is the movie the DC Cinematic Universe needs right now. It retains the already established dark tone of its predecessors while injecting some much-needed moments of humor and humanity. And it feels all the more impressive that the characters who finally get that tone across are traditionally the franchise's villains. Who would have thought a bunch of bad guys could bring so much hope to the superhero genre?

BlackBerry Q10 review

You can't please everybody all the time, and if there's a company who knows this better than the rest, it's BlackBerry. At the showy launch for BlackBerry 10, the company finally unveiled its new stable of smartphones with which it would fight the likes of Apple, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Nokia and Google. No simple task, that, and so BlackBerry rolled out not one, but two weapons: the all-touch Z10 and the portrait-QWERTY Q10.
But there was a catch: only one would launch at a time. It was a staged attack, with the Z10 forming the initial volley. Many said this was a mistake, and that the Q10 and its familiar physical keyboard should have gone first, paving the way for the more radical, all-touch Z10. After what seems like an eternity, the $249 BlackBerry Q10 is finally ready for duty, so let's put it through its paces and see which of these fraternal twins is truly the flagship.

Gallery: BlackBerry Q10 review | 16 Photos

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Pros

• Great physical keyboard
• Solid build quality
• Good display

Cons

• Small display
• Mediocre camera
• Limited app selection

Summary

The BlackBerry Q10 delivers the great QWERTY feel that fans have been waiting for, but those looking to consume content will want to stick to the larger panel on the Z10.

Hardware

As a portrait-QWERTY smartphone, the Q10 is a bit of a rare bird these days. In many ways its closest sibling is actually a phone with a few years of seniority on it, the Bold 9900, a piece of hardware we quite liked despite its aged operating system. That said, the Q10 shares plenty of design language with the keyboard-free Z10.
Its 119.6 x 66.8mm dimensions actually slot in somewhere between those two. The Q10's 10.35mm thickness is one full millimeter thicker than the Z10 that came before and just fractionally thinner than the 9900. You'd never know it, though. Thanks to the Bold's tapered edges, the older phone actually feels considerably thinner.
Both have custom glass-weave back panels, but where the Bold's is just an inset in the center, the Q10's is a full backplate that pops off by sliding downward, exposing a 2,100mAh battery, micro-SIM and microSD expansion. (Note that the white version of the Q10 will feature a rubberized backing, much like the Z10.) It looks quite nice and a soft-touch coating means it isn't likely to slip out of your hand. Plus its composition won't interfere with any of the internal radios, keeping precious signal strength strong. Still, its flat shape doesn't fit the hand anywhere near as nicely as the tapered one on the 9900.

A metal band partway down from the top-rear visually divides the removable battery cover from the rest of the back, which surrounds the 8-megapixel camera and its LED flash -- a near-identical setup to that on the Z10. That sliver of metal protrudes ever so slightly, ostensibly to keep the camera elevated from the table when it's lying on its back, and terminates on the sides of the phone, formed by a black rim.

We're somewhat more drawn to the look of the brushed, stainless-steel rim used on the Bold 9900 than the monotone darkness found in the Q10.

Under here, we're told, is the same metal construction as was used on the 9900, but we have to say we're somewhat more drawn to the look of the brushed, stainless-steel rim used on the elder phone than the monotone darkness found in the Q10. It's very much in line with the Z10 and indeed the PlayBook before, which is to say it's stoic and understated. Looking professional whilst using this phone will certainly not be a problem. Getting your friends and co-workers excited about how the thing looks, however, could be.

Gallery: BlackBerry Q10 vs. Bold 9900 | 7 Photos

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The only visual highlights on the front are another four unpainted stainless bands that separate the rows of keys. These four frets provide plenty of separation for quick touch-typing and are actually a structural element of the chassis now, adding extra rigidity to the mix. Indeed, this phone passes the twist test with flying colors, not flexing or creaking when some torque is applied.
Situated just above the keyboard is a 3.1-inch, 720 x 720 Super AMOLED display. Yes, it's square, which makes watching 16:9 video content a bit of a bother, but it works well in nearly all other regards. In fact, the biggest problem isn't with the display; it's with its placement. The thing is set so far down close to the keyboard that it's actually somewhat difficult to execute the key gesture in BlackBerry 10: swiping up from the bottom bezel.
This is the gesture that exits you from your current app and allows you to peek into the Hub. We constantly found ourselves having to swipe up a second time to successfully get home. Those with small thumbs may have less of a problem, and if you train yourself to actually start your swipe on the keyboard and drag up from there, you'll have more success, but we can't help but wish BlackBerry had shifted the entire display assembly up a quarter-inch or so. There appears to be plenty of room between the top of the display and the earpiece, taken up only by a bit of branding at this point.

Speaking of branding, it's typically minimal here. There's a metal BlackBerry logo inset on the battery cover, which looks quite polished, and an unfortunate silkscreened AT&T globe logo down beneath the spacebar that looks a bit wedged in there.
Situated above the display, and above the BlackBerry branding, are the earpiece, 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a notification LED. Up on top of the device you'll find a power / lock button, 3.5mm headphone jack and a pair of microphones for noise cancellation. Moving to the right side is BlackBerry's excellent three-way volume rocker, with a middle button for play / pause and also for quickly toggling vibration mode. On the bottom, you'll find the primary microphone and the device's speaker -- which, we're happy to report, seems to be quite a bit louder than that on the Z10. Finally, on the left are the micro-USB and micro-HDMI connectors. They're positioned farther up the side than on the Z10, where they sit close to the center, but they are at least the same distance apart, meaning, in theory, a dock built for the Z10 could also work with the Q10.

Gallery: BlackBerry Q10 vs. Z10 | 16 Photos

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Like with the Z10, BlackBerry will offer four SKUs of the Q10, three with LTE (two with HSPA+ and one with CDMA) plus a fourth, non-LTE HSPA+ model. The AT&T version we tested offered quad-band LTE at 2, 4, 5, 17 (700 / 850 / 1700 / 1900) plus penta-band HSPA+ I, II, IV, V, VI (800 / 850 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100) and quad-band EDGE. A second LTE model adds in Verizon-friendly CDMA, with LTE band 13 (700), dual-band CDMA (800 / 1900), dual-band HSPA+ I, VIII (900 / 2100) and quad-band EDGE. The third LTE model offers quad-band LTE at 3, 7, 8, 20 (800 / 900 / 1800 / 2600), quad-band HSPA+ at I, V, VI, VIII (800 / 850 / 900 / 2100) and quad-band EDGE. Finally, there's the penta-band HSPA+ model at I, II, V, VI, VIII (800 / 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100) with quad-band EDGE. All offer 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity and Bluetooth 4.0. Those who like to move it, move it will find an accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer and GPS.
Now, while you can draw your conclusions about what carriers the phone will be arriving on, unfortunately we don't have any confirmations as we write this review. We also don't have a formal release date, but BlackBerry promises it'll be in American stores by the end of May. Canadian readers, meanwhile, can get theirs on May 1st, while European readers should have it before the end of the month.
Powering the device is the same 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 dual-core CPU with 2GB of RAM. The phone also offers 16GB of internal storage, with microSD expansion on tap. Call quality was on-par with the Z10, so about average, but again we're happy to report the built-in speaker on the phone seems to have more oomph than the one on the Z10.

Keyboard

While the display is certainly worth talking about (and we shall, in just a moment), given the internal similarities with the Z10, the highlight of the Q10 is surely its keyboard. Thankfully, it's a very good one -- but we're not entirely sure we'd call it better than that on the Bold 9900. The biggest distinguishing feature is the keyboard layout, which does away with the ergonomic, curved shape in favor of straight rows. While this does mean you may need to move your wrists closer together to achieve proper thumb alignment with the keys, you're not likely to notice much of a difference.
Otherwise, the layout is almost exactly the same, with the only slight difference being the addition of an alternate function on the 0 key: a little microphone. It's with this that you trigger BlackBerry 10's Voice Control feature, though in general we'd much rather just type. And, thankfully, you can. You can just start typing from the phone's home screen to search for apps or contacts. You can also enter in commands, like "email" to start an email or "bbm" to send a message. This is a very handy extension to the OS that can certainly speed up simple tasks.
Overall key shape is the same as on the earlier Bold, with that same gentle arc of the keys curving to meet your thumbs. It is, then, very nearly the same as you've experienced on earlier BlackBerries, and that is, of course, a very good thing. That said, we couldn't help but wonder how this device compares to typing on the new, predictive keyboard on the Z10. So, we compared them.
The move to physical keys defeats some of the most compelling aspects of BlackBerry 10's predictive virtual keyboard, namely the ability to flick upward on individual letters to auto-complete words and the ability to swipe from right to left to delete a whole word. There is a predictive mode you can enable on the Q10, which simply places a row of suggestions along the bottom of the display as you type. We found reaching up to it and then back to the keyboard a bit clumsy and, indeed, it's disabled by default.

In nearly every situation, we were quicker entering text on the virtual keys of the Z10 than the physical ones of the Q10.

Even though the predictive modes on both the Q10 and the Z10 quickly figured out our primary testing phrase ("the quick brown fox...") we were still slightly faster on the Z10. In fact, in nearly every situation we tried, we were quicker entering text on the virtual keys of the Z10 than the physical ones of the Q10. The exception? Email addresses and passwords. Getting to special characters is far less cumbersome when they're all right there on the keys.

Display

It isn't too often you see a square display on a smartphone these days, but then again portrait-QWERTY devices are hardly a dime a dozen either. The panel in the Q10 is a 3.1-inch, 720 x 720 Super AMOLED that, we're happy to report, looks quite good from all angles -- though, it must be said, the color temperature goes from overly warm to cool when you look at it off-angle. Even so, contrast remains quite high. Brightness is also good and the panel is easily visible in direct sunlight.
It's really the size and the shape that are its only detractions. The 3.1-inch display is about 10 percent larger than the 2.8-inch LCD on the Bold 9900, and that we've moved up to 720 x 720 from VGA definitely helps too, but the panel here certainly looks and feels tiny compared to the relatively mammoth displays found on other smartphones. That includes the 4.2-inch, 1,280 x 768 LCD on the Z10, by the way, which feels far better-suited for consuming content, surfing the internet and even cruising through long lists of emails and other social missives.
Of course, that phone doesn't have a keyboard.

Camera

On the Q10, we have the same pair of cameras as we found on the Z10 -- that is, a 2-megapixel shooter in the front and an 8-megapixel unit in the back, paired with an LED flash. Unsurprisingly, then, we found camera performance in the Q10 to be just the same as on the Z. In bright light, photos are passably good, lacking sharpness and having a bit of noise, but color reproduction is solid. Low-light shooting is something we would avoid.

Gallery: BlackBerry Q10 camera samples | 19 Photos

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Skies seemed to actually have their contrasts decreased when HDR was enabled.

That is, unless you enable the new HDR mode that comes along as part of the BlackBerry 10.1 OS update. In this mode, the camera will take two shots at different exposures and average the two together. It will, thankfully, save two shots to camera storage: a normal one and one "enhanced" by the HDR. In almost every circumstance we liked the non-HDR photo better. While dark colors did indeed get richer with HDR enabled, anything that was already well-lit seemed to actually get duller. Disappointingly, skies in particular seemed to actually have their contrasts decreased when HDR was enabled. Finally, as on other platforms, make sure you're only photographing stationary subjects when using HDR. Otherwise you run the risk of introducing some spooky ghosts into your images.

Gallery: BlackBerry Q10 HDR sample shots | 20 Photos

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Maximum video recording is 1080p out of the rear camera, and quality is reasonable. Video can be digitally stabilized here, but as you can see in the sample footage above, enabling it actually introduces some rather distracting jiggling to the mix. We're not entirely sure that's actually better than the shake it aims to replace. The camera is reasonably quick to re-focus while filming, but we did notice a bit of focus-hunting when shooting at more distant targets.

Software

We reviewed the QNX-based BlackBerry 10 quite comprehensively when it released, so we won't cover much of the same ground here, but it is important to note that the Q10 is actually running version 10.1, an update that won't come to the Z10 for a few weeks at least. While there are no major changes, there have been a few tweaks we should mention.
Again, the main feature of BlackBerry 10 is easy multitasking, primarily facilitated by gestures. Swiping up from the bottom bezel of the phone drops you back to your running apps and, as mentioned above, that's actually a bit of a challenge given the proximity of the keyboard to the display. Swipe up and to the right and you get to the BlackBerry Hub, which consumes all your messages from email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BBM and elsewhere into one massive, fast-flowing pile.

Color schemes have been made darker in many apps, helping to boost the battery life on this OLED panel.

With 10.1, you can now download email attachments, a rather necessary feature missing in the initial release, and send pin-to-pin messages in BBM. You can also now paste phone numbers into the dialer and take HDR photos, if you're so inclined. Specifically for the Q10, color schemes have been made darker in many apps, helping to boost the battery life on this OLED panel, and many on-screen controls have been shrunk or removed entirely to make the most of the 3.1 inches on offer here.
The biggest change is the addition of Instant Actions, mentioned above, which enables you to type something like "email bob" to send an email to Bob. Other available commands include "text," "bbm" and "call."
What's not changed? Most everything else, including, most tragically, the navigation app. It's still far too limited to be taken seriously when compared to the mapping offerings from Microsoft, Google or Apple. Similarly, the app selection in BlackBerry World hasn't changed substantially in the past few months since the release of the Z10, leaving it hurting when compared to those other platforms.

Performance and battery life

Given the Q10 offers the same dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 processor and 2GB of RAM as the Z10 you'd expect it to have similar performance. And, indeed, it does. Still, the OS did feel slightly more responsive and apps were slightly quicker to load. We're prone to put this down to internal improvements in BlackBerry OS 10.1 and hope the Z10 will see a similar, if slight, boost when it's available there. The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark seems to back that up, with an average score of 1,456ms. That's a nice improvement over the 1,775ms scored by the Z10, but still a far cry from the sub-1,000ms scores dropped by other top-tier smartphones.
Indeed, overall improvements are slight and the Q10 works and feels very much like its predecessor. While the OS is very quick and responsive and the browser is as well, 3D gaming is not this phone's forte. The Need for Speed game that came pre-loaded on our review unit often stuttered and struggled, and if the pack-in game isn't working well, that's not a good sign. For your more casual mobile gaming pursuits, the Q10 will do just fine.
The Q10 will also do just fine lasting through a day of usage, we found. On our standard battery rundown test, which entails a video looping endlessly while the phone is connected to LTE and with the display on and set to a fixed brightness, the phone managed nine hours and 35 minutes total. That's an hour and 20 minutes more than the Z10 before it, putting it more or less on-par with the LTE Samsung Galaxy S III. More importantly, we easily got through a full day of typically heavy use without reaching for the charger. That said, the 2,100mAh battery pack here is slender enough that carrying a second around won't take up too much space in your satchel.
Finally, boot-up times are still as painfully slow as on the Z10. The phone took one minute and 20 seconds to cold boot and a full 22 seconds just to completely shut down. That'll be a definite pain point for battery-swappers.

Wrap-up

The BlackBerry Q10 is, for the most part, exactly what we expected it to be: a Z10 with a smaller display and a physical keyboard. There's not much between the two phones when it comes to performance or aesthetics and, while the improvement in battery life is nice, both still fall into the "average" category in that regard. Unsurprisingly, then, which of the two is right for you boils down to a single question: how badly do you hate typing on glass?
Again, our testing found text entry to be faster on the Z10 than the Q10 in most situations, but speed doesn't always equate to satisfaction. All things being equal, we'd prefer a physical keyboard to peck at than a piece of glass to smudge, but here we'd choose the Z10 just for that larger display.
And what of the broader question, of whether the $249 Q10 can help BlackBerry get its groove back and compete with the rest? There are certainly those who won't buy a phone without a keyboard, and the Q10 is unquestionably the best phone with a keyboard on the market. However, given how weak the competition and demand there has become, we're not sure cornering that market will move the needle very far in BlackBerry's favor.