BlackBerry Q5 review

The Q5’s keyboard also makes typing long emails easy. Each key has a positive click, and the spaces between them means you’re unlikely to press the wrong letter. Our only criticism is that the keyboard is slightly too wide to use comfortably one-handed.

The small number of available apps is one of the main problems with BlackBerry, and is always the case when a new operating system launches. BlackBerry World is missing a few key apps, too, such as Trainline and the VoIP app Viber. The BBC iPlayer app is just a link to the mobile iPlayer webpage. However, most needs are served by the mobile versions of websites, so unless you rely on particular specialist apps, such as the DS Audio app to stream audio from a Synology NAS device, you shouldn’t have a problem.

The least impressive part of the Q5 is its camera. Indoor performance is reasonable, apart from in very dark conditions where noise becomes a problem, but we weren’t impressed with the phone’s outdoor photos. They looked drab, lacked detail and colour accuracy was way off.

Poor colour accuracy mars the Q5’s photos

In many ways the BlackBerry Q5 is a niche product. For the same price you can buy any number of fast and big-screen Android phones with comprehensive app support, but nothing can touch BlackBerry 10 for messaging. If you’re after the best email phone there is at a fairly reasonable price, the Q5 is for you.