← Previous Next →

Two new BlackBerry phones were unveiled today and we were on the scene to check them out. Here are some pics of the BlackBerry Q10, the first BB 10 phone with a QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry is making its comeback attempt starting today, and it’s bringing an old friend along for the ride. The QWERTY keyboard is back – whether you want it or not. One of BlackBerry’s launch devices, the Q10, has a physical keyboard prominently featured on the device.

Though BB 10 is supposed to be a new starting point for BlackBerry, the company just can’t leave every part of its identity behind. The Q10 has the same look as the famous BlackBerry devices that came before it. Equipped with a 3.1-inch screen and that QWERTY keyboard, it’s a device that was built for those who want to appear like important businesspeople. While the look of the phone isn’t too much of a departure from previous BlackBerry handsets, it’s all about the operating on this one. Running the new BlackBerry 10 OS, the phone looks like it can overpower and out-task its predecessors. Check out our gallery with the Q10 to get a feel for it before it hits store shelves this February and March.

Remember Watson, IBM’s supercomputer that bested Jeopardy champions? IBM is sending its baby off to college so that it can become even smarter.

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York will soon be home to a Watson computer for three years, according to a press release from IBM. While there, RPI’s cognitive science department head, Professor Selmer Bringsjord, will work with his graduate students to add to Watson’s already vast amounts of data. After its stint with RPI, the team expects Watson to be able to process mathematical problems better, determine the meaning of made-up words faster, and be able to process videos, emails, and images from the Internet more effectively. 

Bringsjord, who likens the chance to work on Watson to “a car aficionado being tossed the keys to a souped-up Lamborghini,” says his team might tweak the computer in the future to improve its ability to understand dialogues and sentence structures. The second purpose of Watson’s time with RPI is to help IBM find future potential employees, as the students slated to work on the project will end up being well-trained for big data and cognitive science jobs. The Watson computer can store 15TB of data and can be accessed by 20 users at once. 

This isn’t the first time IBM has collaborated with a company or an education institution to further enhance the famed supercomputer’s abilities. Back in 2012, IBM sent a Watson computer to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University so it could be fed tons of medical journals and research papers. 

Research in Motion came out in full force with the launch of BlackBerry 10, even rebranding the company as BlackBerry. Not everything is changing, though. The new Q10, available in April, maintains the QWERTY keyboard and BlackBerry look. How does it stack up with previous BlackBerry devices? We’ll find out in this Spec Showdown.

The launch of BlackBerry 10 marks the rebirth of the beloved phone franchise. But BlackBerry isn’t the only thing that’s coming back in style. The physical QWERTY keyboard is also making a return. While BlackBerry’s new Z10 handset aims to take on the all-touch market, the company wasn’t ready to fully leave its roots behind. The Q10 has a look and feel that says “traditional BlackBerry.” Do the Q10′s specs stay in line with its predecessors or does the newest QWERTY-equipped phone identify itself as the upstanding and walking evolution of the BlackBerry family? Let’s take a look at the numbers and see.

Conclusion: If you’re looking at a BlackBerry phone with a QWERTY keyboard, the choice is pretty clear with the introduction of the Q10. It blows away its previous installments with ease. A huge upgrade in on board storage, RAM, and processing power makes the Q10 a more reasonable choice for performing all the functions you’ll likely do with your phone. A bigger and better screen offers users the best display option of the bunch. The rear-facing camera gets an improvement and a new front-facing camera is a welcome edition. Given the fact BlackBerry 7 devices will not be upgradable to BB 10, there’s really no reason in our minds to go with anything but the Q10 unless BB 10 proves to be terrible.