By Prince Osuagwu

Did Blackberry go prodigal? Did it miss its way, hiding its traditional rich enterprise features and outlook in a new look Blackberry 10 series?

Was Blackberry’s CEO, John Chen right, early 2014 when he noted that the way to track back to the successes that made the smartphone the toast of every business man in the days of yore, was to go back to the basics? The answer to these questions may actually be in the affirmitive looking at the latest offering, the Blackberry Classic.

In a new management, new goals and policy direction, while assuming office as the Blackberry CEO, Chen had promised that BlackBerry’s short flirtation with touchscreen-only phones will be taking a step back. Part of his policy direction was that the company’s new phones will “predominantly” have physical keyboards.

It was a policy of returning to the corporate and government employees, who need and prefer a quality physical keyboard. This was the core audience it was famous for. In any case, BlackBerry’s touch-only phones didn’t do so hot but rather, at a time, brought a huge loss of up to $1 billion.

Although the back to basics mission may have started with BBQ10 and more recently the Blackberry passport, it is however in the Classic that one sees the blackberry of old in representation.

The Classic may share same hardware with Q10 but it’s in terms of quality of material, finishing touches, attention to details, it’s clearly a more premium, executive device.
Besides, the Classic offers 60 percent more screen space, 50 percent longer battery life and a browser that is three times faster. The device also features the BlackBerry 10.3.1 operating system, a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB of device storage. This is also expandable by up to 128GB via uSD,

The device also dorns a 2MP front- and 8MP rear-facing camera with enhanced optics and upgraded imaging sensors. There is also a BlackBerry Blend feature, a nifty feature that links messaging and content across all of a user’s devices while BlackBerry Hub enables the user to manage all e-mail, texts, BBMs, phone calls and social media in one place.

The device also features the BlackBerry Assistant, the company’s first digital assistant that can be used with voice and text commands.

The feature intelligently determines how to respond to you based on how you interact with it – if you type, it responds silently, if you speak, it speaks back and if you activate over Bluetooth, it speaks back with additional context because it assumes you might not have access to the screen.

No wonder, at launch, Chen said: “We listened closely to our customers’ feedback to ensure we are delivering the technologies to power them through their day and that feedback led directly to the development of BlackBerry Classic,”