Gadgetory

how much would you pay for a hit of nostalgia would you pay 449 bucks for a real keyboard on your phone blackberry says that this is primarily a business phone and maybe that's true but more than that this is phone as fanservice this is the blackberry classic the idea behind the classic is simple and it's actually kind of respectable create a phone that's designed to appeal to hardcore original CrackBerry fans in every way possible if there's something you loved about the 2011 BlackBerry Bold you will almost surely find it here everything is designed to make diehard users feel at home it starts with the hardware which is characterized by the return of all the buttons blackberry lever is called the tool belt and it includes dedicated send and end buttons a back button a Menu key and an optical trackpad none of them are actually necessary they're all functions that have been replaced by touchscreen gestures and by touchscreen button and on blackberry 10 a lot of those gestures are actually kind of finicky so having these buttons does speed things up a bit and then there's that optical trackpad which is a hilarious Mouse like throwback that feels completely vestigial until you figure out you can use it to do some really neat multi-select tricks in your inbox then you find it's useful but it's still funny and kind of weird but the most important buttons are on the keyboard the keyboard is just great it's fast and clicky and responsive and just plain satisfying in a way that glass never is you could get into the minutiae of whether this variant of the bold or the curved is a better one but whatever there's nobody else even bothering to make keyboards right now so this is as good as it gets this thing is blackberry through and through it's easy to hold in one hand it has a textured back so you don't drop it and it has a pretty good but not great 720 by 720 square touch screen which works fine for email but it feels weird for basically anything else it's also pretty heavy thanks to a pretty big battery you can't replace that battery but it lasts just a little bit longer than your average mid-sized smartphone so that's kind of like your favorite BlackBerry's - there's one more thing from yesteryear that you'll find on the blackberry classic the processor it's dated and combined with some software issues that makes a classic feel a little bit like it's a weird mix of fast when you're doing email and slow everywhere else that's a legacy the old blackberries that I wish I'd left behind and one more terrible legacy really bad cameras the 8 megapixel shooter is so slow that I missed more shots than I could make the software on the blackberry classic is kind of all over the place it's at version 10 point 3.1 and that means a blackberry has spent the past a couple of years layering on every possible feature request from its hard core keyboard shortcut customers they're everywhere and though you don't absolutely need to know all those shortcuts if you take the time to learn them you can do all sorts of neat tricks but even if you don't having a keyboard around just speeds up other things from the home screen you can type to bring up the BlackBerry assistant which is sort of like Siri but a little bit better in some ways and you can type at it instead of talking at it actually you can do either because who talks anymore actually I guess some people do and luckily for them call quality in the classic is pretty great but back to the software because at the end of the day it's just not good enough for anybody but the hardest of hardcore BlackBerry fans there are a few good ideas here but there are also just too many compromises there's still two different app stores one for blackberry software and Amazon for Android software but that means you won't get the apps you want and even when you do they're either out-of-date or they're just painfully slow and buggy on the blackberry classic BlackBerry says that this is primarily a business phone and maybe that's true but more than that this is phone as fan service it's by blackberry people for blackberry people the people who are still cleaning for dear life to their aging bulb the classic will let you keep that CrackBerry death-grip going but honestly it's probably time to let go you