T-Mobile and BlackBerry have announced that they’ve buried the hatchet and are working together once again to offer BlackBerry devices to T-Mobile customers, starting with the BlackBerry Classic. Pricing for the Classic is set at $0 down and $18.33/month for 24 months, full retail pricing for the T-Mobile version is set at $439.92. The launch is set for May 13th online and May 15th in-store.
The phone features a slightly larger 3.5-inch display with a 1:1 aspect ratio and the same 720 by 720 pixel resolution as found in the Q10. BlackBerry developed this device to appeal to its legacy customers that have still held onto the BlackBerry Bold 9900, and brought back the “toolbelt” for more familiar device controls in the optical trackpad, and capacitive send/end and back/menu keys. The phone has a 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and a 2-megaixel user-facing camera.
The phone also features an updated 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4 processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with support for microSD cards up to 128GB. The phone runs BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, which features the BlackBerry Hub and the updated Android runtime for full support with the Amazon Android App Store. The BlackBerry Classic also features 22 hours of battery life. Further specifications include LTE, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, FM radio, NFC, as well as full support for GPS and other location services.
