Blackberry Q10 Arrives At FCC, Prepares For US Launch

The Blackberry Q10 has passed mandated FCC testing, the final step in the US release process. The FCC revealed its final approval on Wednesday morning. The Blackberry Q10 is the company’s newest smartphone to feature a QWERTY keyboard alongside a touchscreen based Blackberry 10 OS.

The Q10 is already being offered as a pre-order item by Rogers in Canada and at stores throughout the UK. Both the Canadian and European pre-orders will be made available to customers by the end of April.

The Blackberry Q10 features a 3.1-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen alongside an 8-megapixel camera that outputs up to 1080p at 30fps and a front-facing 2-megapixel front-facing option.

The Q10 also features 16GB on-board storage and 64GB expandable space. The device is powered by a TI OMAP 4470 Dual-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A9 processor along with a PowerVR SGX544 GPU.

In terms of connectivity the Blackberry Q10 offers Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP and HSDPA, HSUPA mobile data speeds.

Blackberry has a lot riding on the release of the Q10. The company’s Z10 smartphone didn’t grab the type of market traction Blackberry had hoped for and it’s still not clear how many users actually want to continue using a QWERTY based keyboard on a mobile device.

Over the last several years analysts have suggested that Blackberry (formerly Research In Motion) could sell its hardware division and instead focus on software solutions. The Blackberry email server (BES) and its other enterprise solutions are still among some of the best in the industry. Blackberry could also leverage its patent portfolio to leverage its software sales.

In any case the Blackberry Q10  is nearing ever closer to a US launch date. Now we just have to wait patiently for Blackberry to provide a US release date and US pricing for the smartphone.

Will you be waiting in line to pick up the Blackberry Q10 smartphone?

[Image via blackberry]