lackBerry Classic QWERTY Phone With BB10 OS Launched at Rs. 31,990

BlackBerry has launched the BlackBerry Classic (Images) in India, priced at Rs. 31,990. The smartphone will be available to purchase via Snapdeal and BlackBerry exclusive stores from Thursday itself.

The Canadian company only last month launched the BlackBerry Classic smartphone globally; thoughBlackBerry had revealed the pricing back in November to be $499 (roughly Rs. 30,800).

Snapdeal says the first 1,000 customers will receive an ‘exclusive offer’ that gives buyback benefits up to Rs. 4,500 for BlackBerry Bold owners, as well as benefits of up to Rs. 10,000 from Yatra.com.

The BlackBerry Classic QWERTY smartphone features a 3.5-inch display with a screen resolution of 720×720 pixels. It offers a pixel density of 294ppi. The smartphone is powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960) processor alongside 2GB of RAM. It comes with 16GB built-in storage, which is further expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB).

Powered by BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, the Classic sports an 8-megapixel auto-focus rear camera with backside illumination (BIS) and LED flash. It can record 1080p videos at 30fps. There is also a 2-megapixel fixed-focus camera that can record 720p videos. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, 4G LTE (with support for Indian LTE bands), GPRS/ EDGE, GPS/ A-GPS, Glonass, Bluetooth, and NFC. It packs accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, proximity, ambient light, and hall sensors.

The BlackBerry Classic packs a 2515mAh battery that is rated to deliver up to 17.2 hours of talk time and up to 15.2 days of standby time. The smartphone will come preloaded with the Amazon Appstore for Android in addition to Blackberry World.

Much like other BlackBerry 10 OS smartphones, the BlackBerry Classic comes preloaded with BlackBerry Hub, BlackBerry Assistant, Dropbox, Adobe Reader, Evernote, BlackBerry Blend, BBM, BlackBerry World, Amazon Appstore, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and YouTube.

BlackBerry’s last major launch in India was with the BlackBerry Passport (Review | Images), back in September. The Passport was priced at Rs. 49,990 in India.