BlackBerry Q10 Release Date: Available for Pre-Order in UK, Ships Before End of April

The QWERTY keyboard-enabled BlackBerry Q10 is now available for pre-order in the UK, and the new smartphone is set to ship before the end of April.

"Today, Carphone Warehouse customers in the United Kingdom will be able to pre-order the BlackBerry Q10 on O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Three, EE and TalkMobile. Plus, the handset will be available for purchase in Carphone Warehouse stores from the end of April," BlackBerry wrote on its blog.

The Q10 is available for free with a two-year, £36 per month contract. It is also available unlocked for £579.95. It is the second offering from BlackBerry this year, with three or four more handsets planned for release in 2013.

The Q10 is the sibling phone to the BlackBerry Z10, the company's first all-touch handset. The Z10 has exceeded all sales expectations, and more than 1 million of the devices have already been sold in the United States alone.

Both phones run BlackBerry's newly revamped BB10 software, which includes a gesture based control interface, doing away with home keys. It also features the return of BlackBerry Messenger, which has now been integrated into the BlackBerry Hub, an all-inclusive gateway to media, contacts and messages.

While the Q10 has the same type of screen as the Z10,  it's keyboard takes up much of the available real estate, and it does not slide away like some Droid models, so the screen on the Q10 is much smaller than average and square shaped.

The BlackBerry Q10 features a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 plus processor, 2GB of RAM, a 3.1-inch 720x720 touchscreen display, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video, 16GB of internal storage, an SD card slot for up to another 64GB of storage, a full physical QWERTY keyboard and runs the newly revamped BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Check back for the latest information on the BlackBerry Q10 as it becomes available.