BlackBerry Z3

BlackBerry genuinely does know how to build beautiful phones. The Z3 is ridiculously good looking and its construction quality is impeccable. As of now, it's only available in black but we wouldn't be surprised to see a white edition in the future. The front is all smooth glass, and there really isn't much bezel space around the screen itself. The rear is made of a texturised soft-touch plastic with the classic BB logo in the centre. For better or worse, the battery is non-removable.

The camera and flash are in the top-left corner of the rear, much like they are on the older Z10. A plastic flap on the phone's right edge covers the SIM and microSD card slots, while the power button is placed towards the top of the left edge with the volume controls and voice command shortcut button below it. The Micro-USB port is on the bottom and 3.5mm headset port is on the top. The Z3 doesn't have a mini-HDMI port, which sets it apart from its higher-end siblings.

There's good news and bad news - while the Z3 is brand new and undoubtedly good-looking, it's built with mostly utilitarian components. The processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 with integrated Adreno 305 graphics, but there's a generous 1.5GB of RAM to keep things humming along. The screen is a bit of a letdown at 540x960 pixels despite its large size. There's Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 along with A-GPS, FM radio, an accelerometer and a proximity sensor. There's only 8GB of internal storage space, but microSD cards of up to 32GB are supported (and 64GB cards might work unofficially).

The main magnetization is of course the BlackBerry 10 OS. The Z3 comes with version 10.2.1 which is considerably improved over the version that originally shipped with the Z10. The phone might be physically similar to pretty much every other touchscreen smartphone out there, but the BlackBerry OS takes quite a bit of time and effort to get used to, even for users of older non-touch BlackBerrys .

BBM is still a major part of the BlackBerry ecosystem and there are more features for BlackBerry 10 users than there are for iPhone and Android users. It's also integrated  into the Hub as a first-class citizen, whereas some other app alerts are just lumped under Notifications. BBM has several strong features compared to today's dominant messaging apps, especially in allowing you to control who can message you. Even so, none of this is enough to drive anyone to choose a BlackBerry phone over the competition. BBM just isn't the powerful draw it once was.