Blackberry had unveiled its new Phone named BlackBerry Leap a few days back in India. It finally launched the BlackBerry Leap in India on Monday, priced at Rs 21,490.
BlackBerry Leap has a 5-inch HD screen and is powered by a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm MSM 8960 processor with 2GB RAM. It has 16GB internal memory which can be further expanded to 128GB via micro-SD card. It has 8 megapixel rear camera with flash and 1.1 megapixel front camera. It is powered by a 2800 mAH non-removable Lithium Ion battery. Leap measures 144 x 72.8 x 9.5mm and weighs 170 grams. The Smartphone runs BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, which has few new elements as compared to BlackBerry OS 10.1. On the app front, to run Android apps one can side load an APK file and even or download a selection from the Amazon app store. The company claims 25 hours of battery life for the phone.
The device comes equipped with support for encryption, built-in malware protection and back-up, wipe and restore.
Two interesting features in BlackBerry Leap are Blend and Assistant. BlackBerry Blend brings messaging and content that is on your BlackBerry Smartphone to your computer and tablet for unified experience. It will work across desktop operating systems, including Mac OS X 10.7 +, Windows 7+ and Android tablets running Android 4.4+ via cellular, USB or Wi-Fi connections. Using it one can get instant message notifications, read and respond to work and personal email, text messages, access documents, calendar, contacts and media in real time on whatever device you are on.
On the other hand BlackBerry Assistant is BlackBerry’s first digital assistant and can be used with voice and text commands to help users manage work and personal email, contacts, calendar and other native BlackBerry 10 applications. BlackBerry Assistant 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.
But the biggest change is the keyboard: the Leap eschews the physical keyboard we’ve come to expect from BlackBerry for a virtual one. It supports multiple languages and will step in to correct your egregious typos, and generally behaves much like a virtual keyboard on a modern Smartphone should. More importantly, the lack of a physical keyboard means you’ll have the full 5-inch display to play with. Its screen is also very bright, though the 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution is a touch low for a modern Smartphone at this size.
Now, when it comes to the additional features on the device, that’s where BlackBerry did a little bit of trimming. The BlackBerry Leap includes Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy and EDR, plus it supports video out via Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast and of course, assisted, autonomous, and simultaneous GPS are on board as well as support for User Plane and Control Plane GPS. Aside from the LTE support, you also get 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi in the 2.4GHz flavour, as well as support for Mobile Hotspot.