BlackBerry Z10 vs Nexus 4: pricing is everything

We have already touched on why we love the Nexus 4 so much. If you remember, one of those reasons was pricing, which we think will often play an important role. Stepping outside of the world of Android for a moment and today was a rather big day for BlackBerry. The company announced a pair of smartphones, one of which is the Z10, a full-touchscreen device that will arrive running BlackBerry 10.

The BlackBerry event covered a good deal about the phones, including the specs as well as other important aspects such as apps, and availability. We have yet to learn everything about pricing for the Z10, however based on what we have seen thus far — it is looking like it will be competitive. Take the US for example, we know the handset is heading to a variety of carriers but so far only Verizon Wireless has specified the price.

Verizon will be selling the BlackBerry Z10 for $199 on a two-year agreement. We suspect the other carriers (namely T-Mobile and AT&T) will have the Z10 similarly priced. Speculation of carrier pricing aside, the interesting part here is the Z10 seems to have fallen at that magical price point for smartphones. The point where if it was any higher, some may rule it out based on price alone. While this will not matter quite as much for Verizon (given they do not have a Nexus 4 available), this does bring some question for T-Mobile — will smartphone shoppers be tempted to go with the BlackBerry Z10?

Granted, we suspect those looking for an Android smartphone will stick with Android. On the flip side though, the price of the Z10 could attract some previous BlackBerry users back now that they have a modern, full touchscreen device available. We are fairly certain that Android fans are familiar with the specs of the Nexus 4, so lets take a look at what the Z10 offers in terms of hardware. The handset has a 4.2-inch (1280 x 756 and 356ppi) display, dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, microSD card slot, 1800 mAh removable battery, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, 2 megapixel front-facing camera and an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash.

Simply put, a decent set of specs. Then again, as we have seen with other mobile operating systems — specs and pricing are just a few of the overall factors that will be considered. We also have the apps. But while the app situation may have hurt Windows Phone, it may not be as big of an issue for BlackBerry mainly because we suspect there are still some loyal users who are waiting to upgrade an aging device or to be convinced to come back.