BlackBerry Porsche Design P'9983 Premium Qwerty Smartphone Launched

By Ketan Pratap | Updated: 18 September 2014 10:58 IST

BlackBerry, in collaboration with Porsche Design luxury brand, has launched the new Porsche Design P'9983 smartphone.

The Canadian handset maker announced the smartphone at an event in Dubai and revealed that the smartphone will be available starting October from Porsche Design stores, select carriers and retailers. No pricing details have been announced.

The Porsche Design P'9983 is the third smartphone launched in collaboration between BlackBerry and Porsche Design, the first two being BlackBerry Porsche P9981 and Porsche Design P'9982.

Notably, the handset features a premium quality build such as camera lens made out of sapphire glass; Porsche Design floating logo and chassis sporting forged stainless steel, and also comes with special glass-weave technology for the back.

BlackBerry in a press statement notes that the "Porsche Design P'9983 is the first Qwerty version with BlackBerry 10 with specially crafted glass-like keys with the durability of rigid synthetic material, and a special 3D effect with silver font characters."

One of the highlight features of the Porsche Design P'9983 is the Unique PIN; BlackBerry provides an exclusive Porsche Design PIN range to every consumer.

The new premium smartphone from BlackBerry comes with BlackBerry 10 goodies such as BlackBerry Hub, and BlackBerry World (for downloading business and productivity apps).

Apart from BlackBerry World, the Porsche Design P'9983 running BlackBerry 10.3 was detailed by the official BlackBerry blog post to come with access to Amazon's Appstore for Android.

Earlier this year, BlackBerry had signed a licensing deal with Amazon that would allow BB10 users to access around 240,000 Android apps from Amazon's app store this fall.

Aftermarket accessories for the premium smartphone will also be available including handcrafted fine Italian leather backdoors available in colours Yellow, Blue Green, Dark Brown, Pomegranate, Paloma Grey, Salsa, Blue and Orange.

For specifications, Porsche Design P'9983 comes with 3.1-inch HD touch screen; 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (MSM8960); 2GB of RAM; 64GB inbuilt storage; expandable up to 128GB (via microSD card); 2100mAh battery; 8-megapixel rear camera; 2-megapixel front camera; Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n; Bluetooth 4.0; LTE; FM radio; Micro-USB, and Micro-HDMI connectivity support.