BlackBerry revealed the Porsche P’9982 – the first BlackBerry Porsche running BlackBerry 10. The Porsche Design P’9982 is an all touch smartphone and is the second model in the BlackBerry and Porsche Design series.

The luxury of the P’9982 can be seen in its satin finished frame forged from stainless steel and a hand-wrapped  Italian leather back door. The limited edition model of the P’9982 features a back door,  hand-wrapped in genuine Crocodile leather. It’s so exclusive, there are only 600 of this in the entire world. The P’9982 phones have a series of unique BBM PINs that distinguish them from all other BlackBerry devices.

The BlackBerry Porsche P’9882 ships with the latest BlackBerry 10 update – BlackBerry 10.2 which features a Priority Hub for important contacts and messages, BBM now which allows users reply BBM messages within any app and special Porsche Design only apps.

The phone hits stores on November 21 with an exlusive launch at Harrods, London. The limited Crocodile edition will be available beginning early December, and will be exclusive to the Porsche Design shop-in-shop at Harrods. Pricing starts at $2,400.

Here’s a video of the BlackBerry Porsche P’9882

BlackBerry officially announced their new flagship phone running BlackBerry 10.2 – BlackBerry Z30. The BlackBerry Z30’s main features are its 5-inch Super AMOLED display, 1.7GHz processor with quad-core graphics and 2880mAh battery. The Z30 also sports the same weaved back as the BlackBerry Q10.

Early leaks of the device called it an A10 but now we know better. BlackBerry hasn’t seen a great year selling it’s BlackBerry 10 devices worldwide – mainly due to a limited number of Apps in BlackBerry World and its pricing strategy.

The phone comes with two new features. The first is simply called BlackBerry Natural Sound which apparently makes “conversations sound like you’re in the same room” when used with BBM Voice and BBM Video, the second is a new antenna technology that tunes reception so you don’t get calls hanging up mid-conversation in low signal areas. The antenna technology dubbed BlackBerry® Paratek Antenna can also give you faster data transfers.

BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.2 is expected to be available for the BlackBerry Z10, BlackBerry Q10 and BlackBerry Q5 in mid-October. The update is subject to carrier testing and approvals.

The Z30 will be available next week in the UK and Middle East and begin rolling out to other countries from then on. We’ll let you know when it becomes available in Nigeria. Check out the promo video below:

MTN Nigeria

Airtel Nigeria

BlackBerry’s next flagship phone, the BlackBerry Z30 ,previously called the A10 has leaked in this new hands-on video. The Z30 is rumored to sport a 5-inch AMOLED display running at 720p resolution, powered by a dual-core processor. Rumors also feature an 8-megapixel camera, and 16GB of storage. This leak is coming from Channel S.

If you watch the video, you’ll see an An AT&T logo at the back of the smartphone. Channel S says the phone will hit the markets in the fall.

Source: The Verge via Engadget

BlackBerry has announced today that its new BlackBerry Q5, the latest in its line of BlackBerry 10 smartphones, will be available in its Nigerian partner stores. The BlackBerry Q5 is lighter than the BlackBerry Q10 and features rounded keys on its physical keyboard. The Q5 also has a 3.1-inch LCD touchscreen with a resolution of 720 x 720 pixels and is available in red, white and black colours.

The smartphone has an internal memory of 8GB with 2GB of RAM. If you’ll like to expand internal memory, there’s a microSD slot that takes cards up to 32GB.

READ: BlackBerry Announces Q5 With QWERTY Keyboard

The BlackBerry Q5 runs the BlackBerry 10 OS which has features like Peek which lets you view notifications while you’re in another app and Time Shift in the camera app. It has a front-facing 5 megapixel camera(with autofocus and LED flash) that takes pictures at a resolution of 2592х1944 pixels. It captures 1080p videos @30fps. The front camera on the other hand is a 2 megapixel camera and it captures videos at 720p.

READ: BlackBerry Z10 Review

After the Z10, the Q5 is the second largest shift from the old and regular BlackBerry designs. We’ll be on the lookout to see how BlackBerry fans receive it and how it plays in the market.

Learn how to activate data plans for the BlackBerry Q5 on MTN and Airtel here.

We know you’ve all been waiting for this the last few weeks. This is our review of the BlackBerry Z10 – BlackBerry’s flagship phone for its BlackBerry 10 OS. This review is split into parts so you can jump right into any part you wish. Let’s review!

Design

The Z10′s design reminds us a lot of the iPhone 5. It lacks physical front buttons and to operate it you have to get used to the gestures.

If you looked at it from afar and you couldn’t see the BlackBery logo, you’d think it were an iPhone 5. It also reminds us of the Xperia Z – although the screen isn’t so wide.

It’s got a mini-HDMI and a microUSB port on the left side, volume, pause and play controls on the right side, lock button on the top right beside the earphone slot. The back is made of plastic, but it’s brushed plastic so it doesn’t scratch and there’s a metal BlackBerry icon right in the middle at the back. The camera and flash are placed at the top-left corner.

At the front, we’ve got a camera just below the speakers. Just so you know it’s a BlackBerry, there’s an LED light at the top right to indicate notifications. At the bottom we have the BlackBerry logo and the microphone.

What impressed me the most was the design on the inside. The Z10 has a very irregular battery size. It’s longer than it is wide. I also like that the microSD slot is right below the SIM card and there’s a flap protecting it. However, I don’t like that you have to remove the battery to get the SIM card out. The Z10 uses a micro SIM.

The weight of the phone is just great. It’s quite light but you’ll feel it in your pocket because of the length of the phone.

Hardware Specs and Performance.

The BlackBerry Z10 packs a 1.5GHz dual-core processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage [only 13GB is available for use]. The phone never hung or lagged as far as I’ve used it. The only time you’ll experience lagging is if you’re using an app that requires the internet and the internet is poor. It could also hang if an app is poorly built.

I had no problems playing video on this device. I played all kinds of videos from 360p to 720p to 1080p just to test the RAM out.

The phone gives you abilities to connect to WiFi and use it as a WiFi hotspot, I used it a lot with WiFi but didn’t get to test the hotspot capability. Although there’s a warning that tells you to plug your phone to a power source if you wish to use it as a hotspot and I found that very handy.

The phone heats up when you’re downloading, lets say a 500MB file. It also heats up when you’re on a 3G network and sometimes on EDGE. This makes the phone difficult to use because it’s like holding a hot pot.

Of all the phones I’ve used over Bluetooth, the Z10 has the fastest transfer rate because it’s got Bluetooth 4.0 – streams music perfectly to your computer or Bluetooth device.

Display

The Z10 has got a 4.2-inch LCD display which is just the perfect size because my palms are large but 4.0-4.2 inch screens are usually perfect. The screen is small compared to the Galaxy S3 and S4, but I find it difficult to reach app icons that are at the top on both phones. On the Z10, I can reach app icons anywhere.

When you move the brightness setting up to 8, it’s bright enough in the Lagos sun but it’s still not as bright as the Galaxy S3 or S4 because they’ve got AMOLED screens and AMOLED has this shiny ability. The Z10′s screen is however, at par with Nokia’s Lumia 920.

The screen has a resolution of 1280×768 pixels but the LCD gives it some sort of dullness.

The music player worked great until I plugged the earphones in. It stopped music playback on its own a couple of times and then showed an error and basically crashed. The music player still has problems even after I upgraded the OS.

Cameras

Equipped with 2 cameras, the Z10 gives you the ability to video chat or take pictures of anything you wish.

The rear-facing camera is an 8.0 megapixel camera with an LED flash by the side. It takes pictures really fast and at the instant you tap the screen. It’s amazing

Pictures are absolutely perfect outdoors, but when you’re indoors they’re kind of blurry. The camera doesn’t do well in low-light and the flash doesn’t help. The flash seems to concentrate at one point of the image and makes it even worse.

Compared to the Lumia 920′s camera, the Z10 takes darker pictures. The 920 has low light sensors that adapt in low-light situations.

I also found that the Z10′s camera app doesn’t have as many options as the Galaxy S4′s camera app. The S4 gives you almost 10 different shooting situations it can adapt to, just like it’s a regular digital camera. The Z10 has a normal shooting mode, a stabilization mode and a burst mode for taking multiple pictures.

However, I also love the timeline feature of the camera. This allows you take about 10 pictures of an object in motion and then select which one is best. Very useful when taking pictures of children.

The front-facing camera is a 2 megapixel camera. You’ll notice this immediately when you compare pictures with the rear-facing one. It’s extremely useful for checking what you look like when there’s no mirror. That’s apart from its use as a camera for video calling.

It also takes pictures very fast.

Accesories

The BlackBerry Z10 comes with a microUSB cable, two power ports – a 2-pin one and a 3-pin one. It also comes with an earphone and a battery.

I honestly wish there was a second microUSB cable in the box but I’m satisfied with the earphones. They’re not as loud as Apple’s earphones but they’re just good enough so you can hear the bass.

Additional accessories you’ll need for this phone are a pouch and a screenguard.

Battery Life

I found the Z10′s battery lasting up to 6 hours of video playback which I consider great. The problem begins when you connect the Z10 to the internet. More than 50% of the battery dies within the first 5 hours of use. When you download a lot of content, the battery dies faster. No matter how great your internet connection is.

Operating System

The Z10 runs the BlackBerry 10 OS. I’ll have to dedicate an entire blog post to the OS but here’s what’s new in BlackBerry 10.

It’s a whole new interface. No more cluttered black menus with endless lists. Everything is on a white background and it’s neat.

There’s a side application called “Hub” that holds all your notifications and messages. The best part about hub is that you can view notifications by an action called “Peek”. To “Peek”, all you need to do is swipe up within an app and then to your right. You can then reply emails and other messages from the Hub.

I found the Hub very useful when I couldn’t remember where certain messages came from.

When you first use the device, you’ll notice there’s no homescreen like on Android. What you have is basically all your apps. You can then rearrange the app icons or place them in folders. As an Android user, I found swiping for apps very tedious. I would love multiple home screens in the next update.

You can view apps you have running on a special screen that shows updates from the social  network apps (like Windows Phone’s live tiles). This screen is also where you close  applications when you’re done with them. My biggest problem with this is that it  seems to only be able to run 8 apps at a time. I find that very disturbing and not-  so-smart.

When you slide your finger from the top down, you’ll get a bar that allows you  make quick changes. You can turn Bluetooth, WiFi, Alarm, Rotation Lock and  Notifications off and on. It comes in handy but I’ll really love a brightness setting  put in.

The bar seems to waste a lot of space as it stops halfway through the screen. I think  the bottom could include more options like music control options.

Although I’m used to SwiftKey Flow on Android, I really like the BlackBerry 10′s  keyboard. The first time I used it, it seemed to have picked certain words like  ”Abeg” from my Twitter feed. Next-word-prediction occurs on the next letter you  might type. You then have to swipe that word into any text field. When you  misspell a word, there’s an option to swipe the misspelt word from the space bar or  tap the space bar to enter a correction.

All in all BlackBerry 10 has a beautiful and simple interface. The entire OS is gesture  powered since the Z10 lacks physical buttons. It would take some getting used to if  you’re coming from a QWERTY background.

Apps

The BlackBerry Z10 comes with a few pre-installed apps. They’ve got the regular Calendar, contacts, DocsToGo, email, text mesages, pictures, music, settings and video apps. Then there are the Adobe Reader, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare apps.

BlackBerry went a step further and added a new File Manager, Newsstand, a weather app, and apps for Box and Dropbox.

For things we’ve never seen on a BlackBerry before, you have Remember Me – which is basically Evernote, and Story Maker for editing and creating videos. Remember Me lists notes and reminders in alphabetical order. As an Evernote user, I like to immediately read my recent clips because sometimes I forget the title of the page or words from the content.

I found the App World as lacking and as expensive as it was before BlackBerry 10. I honestly don’t think I should pay $3 for a Twitter app or $0.99 for an app that is a link to Tumblr. It still seems like the largest social networks and messaging platforms are ignoring BlackBerry. I like that App World recommended apps I had on my previous BlackBerry. It makes switching to a new phone easier.

I was however impressed with the improved quality of games. There’s now Stick Tennis and I really like Sector Strike – it’s like Space Impact in colour but it heats up your phone. Also, a number of games require you to sign into the Games application before using them. I found that tedious and unnecessary.

There are a lot of great games on BlackBerry 10 if you’re willing to search. I’m not satisfied by the fact that the YouTube ‘app’ is STILL just a link to YouTube.com

Conclusions

I’m really impressed by the beauty and design of BlackBerry 10. It’s clear that BlackBerry put a lot of work into this and built it from the ground up. For its price range, I think it’s too expensive compared to other phones like the Lumia 920, Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5. A lot more work needs to be put into applications like the Music Player and Remember Me.

Data isn’t cheap in Nigeria and the Z10 plans cost a lot. I’ll like a feature that lets me turn off notifications from certain apps. When I turn them off in the Hub, I find that the apps still pull notifications until I logout. It’s one of my favorite features of Android phones and I think BlackBerry can benefit from that.

BlackBerry clearly needs to speak to and convince a lot of app developers to build for this platform. I personally think a lot of people pick smartphone platforms based on available apps. Android and iOS app stores certainly have an advantage over BlackBerry’s App World.

There’s no word yet on when Nigerians are going to be able to get their hands on the phone, but being that all the others have launched around the same time they did in the U.S., I think we’ll see it then.

The phone will be a high-end phone with BlackBerry 10, higher than the Z10 and Q10, leaving the Q5 as a lower end phone for emerging markets as intended. It’s meant to act as a competitor for the iPhone and Galaxy S4

No photos of the A10 have surfaced, all we know is Sprint will carry the phone in the U.S. in and it will launch towards American Thanksgiving.

We’ll make sure to keep you posted as the story develops.

BlackBerry has teamed up with Model and TV presenter Eku Edewor to launch the Type faster than Eku BlackBerry challenge. Eku Edewor has said no BlackBerry user in Nigeria can type faster than she can and has posed a challenge.

From the 25th of May to the 30th of May, BlackBerry users stand a chance to win a BlackBerry Q10 by competing against Eku Edewor in a live tournament. To compete and win tickets for the live tournament, head to BellaNaija and answer the question. You can also enter the competition by tweeting @ekuedewor and @bellanaija or on Facebook via the BellaNaija and Eku Edewor fan pages.

Winners of the competition will challenge Eku Edewor on Friday May 31st in front of a live audience at the Silverbird Galleria, Victoria Island, Lagos.

BlackBerry‘s Q4 results are out, and the company isn’t in ruins as a lot of people predicted. They’re not doing amazing, but they aren’t doing poorly either.

The company already sold 1 million phones running the BlackBerry 10 OS released earlier this year. The Blackberry Z10 and Q10 went on sale around the world from January 31, 2013 (it went on sale in Nigeria on March 1), so keep in mind BlackBerry’s fourth quarter runs from December 2nd, 2012 until March 2nd, 2013.

Blackberry also reported a net profit of $98 million, or 22 cents a share this quarter, which isn’t bad at all. However, year-end revenue was $11.1 billion, down 40 percent from last year’s $18.4 billion. Pretty tough, but hey, at least we know we can stop with the BlackBerry-Microsoft buyout jokes. The company, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM), is doing quite well.

The next quarter is due to be reported on June 28, so let’s see if it goes up from here.

Waldi Wepener, Managing Director for West, East and Central Africa at BlackBerry said, “We are excited to build on our success as the leading smartphone provider in Nigeria with the launch of the new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. BlackBerry 10 provides a whole new mobile computing experience for our Nigerian customers, as well as more choice alongside our range of BlackBerry 7 smartphones, which remain very popular in Nigeria.”

We’ve watched the internet the last few weeks and it’s no news that Nigerians are yearning for the BlackBerry Z10. BlackBerry has done the background work to make the Z10 get to Nigeria as soon as possible.

CHECKOUT: BLACKBERRY Z10: SPECS + PHOTOS

The full touchscreen BlackBerry Z10 is the most popular advanced BlackBerry ever and is BlackBerry’s flagship phone for its all new BlackBerry 10 OS. The second phone is the hybrid touchscreen and physical keyboard BlackBerry Q10.

If you’ll like to get it on launch day, checkout this list of service providers that allow you pre-order online. For more information on where you can get these devices in your area, visit http://blackberry.com.ng

Do you think BlackBerry’s new smartphones will be a hit in Nigeria? Please leave us a comment below.