BlackBerry 10 has broken cover, and the first shipping phone, the Z10, has everyone asking how the market compares. We've tabulated several of the top-rated phones, and ranked them alongside the Z10 and Q10 to see how they stack up.
Some points of interest:
BlackBerry has set a new high-watermark with screen pixel density. Anything over 300 is good, but the Q10's promised 360ppi is streets ahead of the market. Apple's vaunted Retina displays only offer 326ppi. Screen sizes still vary, but with the exception of the upcoming Q10 (which gets a pass for its keyboard form factor), 4-inch is the absolute minimum - we're trending towards a 4.5-inch average.
Although most of the top-end mobiles now support high-speed LTE data connections, unfortunately that still varies by region, so US LTE support doesn't imply that South African customers will get the same - most of the models ship in LTE and non-LTE versions. NFC is almost universal, as is Bluetooth 4.0.
There appears to be a steady drift away from SD expansion support. Maybe cloud storage is the future, but when you're paying per MB it's nice to have local storage options too. In particular, any phone with 16GB of flash storage is at the low end of on-board capacity, so 16GB combined with no SD does start to look a bit cramped. Nexus 4 and HTC Windows 8x, I'm looking at you.
Camera technology has stabilised around the 8MP mark - now all the emphasis is on quality over quantity, where Nokia has an edge with its PureView technology, and software - photo editing and sharing are the focus areas.
Across the board, every top-end phone now uses dual- or quad-core processors, separate GPUs for graphics, and one or two GB of RAM. 2GB is likely to become standard in 2013.
Six hundred US dollars is the rough mean retail price for these devices, though most are bought on subsidised contracts. Anything substantially higher or lower tends to stand out.
Lastly, apart from the newly launched BlackBerry models, these are all several months old, and most are due for refresh this year. Expect to see the spec averages creeping upwards steadily as new models launch.
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