Yesterday, during BlackBerry's time to shine at the unveiling of Blackberry 10, Nokia sent a snarky Tweet through its official @nokia Twitter handle: "Blackberries make a great snack, but for the world's best business smartphone try a #Lumia."
With its new sleek black handsets and its reputation, BlackBerry, by all accounts, would normally be taken for the better business smartphone over the candy-colored Nokias any day. But how to they really stack up, as far as technical specifications and features? Let's compare Nokia's flagship, the Lumia 920 to BlackBerry's new Z10.
Display
The new BlackBerry Z10 has the standard large-display touchscreen smartphone form factor. Its display is 4.2 inches and the screen has a maximum resolution so 1280x768p at 356 pixels per inch. Compared to that, the Nokia's PureMotion HD+ at 4.5 inches and 1280x768p resolution at 332 ppi is pretty comparable: a little more screen, with a little less brilliance.
Processor
The BlackBerry Z10 and Nokia Lumia 920 both have dual-core 1.5 GHz processors, which put them in the lower-performance category compared to some of the new 5-inch smartphones by Samsung, HTC, and Sony. The BlackBerry doubles the Lumia's 1GB RAM.
Storage
The Nokia Lumia 920 only has 32GB of storage with no expansion through a microSD card. The BlackBerry comes with 16GB built in, and can expand up to 64GB more through the SD card.
Cameras
The Nokia Lumia 920 has a 8.7 megapixel PureView main camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera capable of 720p. The Z10's 8 megapixel main camera can do 1080p HD video, and its front-facing camera is 2 megapixels with 720p, as well. The software that comes with each phone's camera system is really where the comparison counts. If you want native video conferencing with screen sharing so that you can present documents and alter them with other BlackBerry users, the Z10 is your phone. Nokia's Lumia 920 offers native apps like panoramic photo stitching and City Lens, which is an early augmented reality viewfinder that helps you see labels on buildings and ratings for restaurants that overlay on top of the real-time picture. That said, City Lens and panoramic photos aren't very business oriented.
Other Considerations
You talk a lot in business, and both the BlackBerry Z10 and the Lumia 920 offer about 10 hours of talk time. Both are LTE certified. Both have live-updated home screens, the Lumia with live tiles and the BlackBerry's less flashy BlackBerry 10 operating system.
But the BlackBerry 10 OS only has an app library of about 70,000 (granted, they launched it yesterday), while Windows Phone recently boasted that it added 75,000 apps, doubling their library. And, as AllThingsD noted, BlackBerry has cool native apps and a lot of popular ones (including Angry Birds... sigh) but they're notably lacking Instagram, Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, Youtube, and Google Maps right now.
That makes the otherwise closely comparable Lumia 920 more flexible and feature-rich, for now. And if you're a serious business person, you can always get the black Lumia 920