This article is more than 1 year old

BlackBerry Leap: Touching biz users with a budget(ish) device

Perfect corporate fleet fodder, if you drive a hard bargain

The message

The software is BlackBerry’s most recent, feature-rich and very focused BlackBerry OS version 10.3.1. Don’t expect any themes or funky widgets here. Similarly, the design isn’t going to turn any heads at a Paris fashion show, but it comes cased in a very grippy rubberised plastic. (One of my children, who sees a lot of new smartphones, said this was the “coolest” device in the house because of this.)

BlackBerry Leap

Default apps listing

The display held up reasonably well in bright sunlight (caveat: at this latitude, London isn’t really “bright” even when the sun’s out) and it feels light for its size. The display did seem to pick up and retain smudges, though.

BB10 is built around messaging. I like the ability to have a persistent notifications list, the Hub (demos here), and not to have to hunt around in various places for updates to email, IM and social networks. Finding things in messages, thanks to the excellent Assistant search feature, is invariably faster on BlackBerry than anything else. Email triage is probably as fast, or faster on rivals. But not by much, and the milliseconds lost are compensated by the time saved not hopping around various apps.

BlackBerry Leap

Pics are pretty decent although the autofocus can be a bit slow

I particularly miss the BlackBerry virtual keyboard which is streets ahead of the competition, when using another device. In truth, while the world has been ignoring BlackBerry for two years, the competition has been pinching features from it like mad.

You won’t see some of BlackBerry’s key features, like virtual SIM billing, virtual workspaces, BBM Meetings and encrypted messaging unless you’re a business with a BlackBerry server, (which can either be run in-house, or hosted). With a BES12 server you can push down corporate apps into a secure partition and choose from a business-only catalog. Consumers never see this side of the phone. Key work applications like Cisco WebEx have BlackBerry versions, while an Android run-time takes cares of most of the rest.

BlackBerry Leap

Great search functionality but alas, no compass capability on this ole chip. The hub remains intact

In practice, I didn’t find the use of an old and slower SoC to be an issue except for two areas. For essential communications, the Leap is fine. The browser struggled with some modern web pages, however, especially when they popped up modern advertising. The gears would then grind as the browser worked out how to cope with all this. I know the BlackBerry browser is excellent (and was winning benchmarks), but I really began to dread opening it.

Next page: Budget performer

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like