BlackBerry has launched its long-awaited Classic smartphone in India at Rs 31,990. The phone will be available exclusively on online marketplace Snapdeal starting January 15.

Snapdeal and BlackBerry will offer a buyback bonus of up to Rs 4,500 to the first 1,000 customers who swap their Bold smartphones with the Classic. It will also offer discounts from Yatra.com worth Rs 10,000.

The Classic is targeted at BlackBerry loyalists who still use older versions of its physical keyboard devices such as the Bold as the phone features all legacy keys including the menu, back and call answer and reject keys in addition to a touch display.

With the Classic and the recent launch of its Passport smartphone, BlackBerry is in some ways taking the company back to its roots, focusing mainly on the physical keyboard, which made the company's devices popular among messaging and email junkies.



The BlackBerry Classic sports a 3.5-inch square touch display with a resolution of 720x720p. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus processor and 2GB RAM, the phone comes with 16GB storage expandable via microSD card up to 128GB. The USP of the phone is its 35 key backlit keyboard.

It runs BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.3.1 and comes with Amazon Appstore in addition to BlackBerry World to download Android apps.

The Classic sports an 8MP auto-focus camera capable of recording 1080p video and a 2MP front-facing camera.

It comes with a 2515mAh battery with a claimed talk time of up to 11.7 hours and standby time of up to 14.5 days on 3G.

In terms of connectivity, the phone supports 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, 4G (only FDD-LTE), FM Radio and GPS.

"With the launch of BlackBerry Classic, we bring back the unique BlackBerry QWERTY experience that made the BlackBerry smartphones a users' go-to productivity tool," said Sunil Lalvani, managing director, BlackBerry India. "The BlackBerry Classic is designed to give users a distinct experience that every BlackBerry QWERTY loyalist and high-productivity business customer will love. This device brings the best of BlackBerry features and the keyboard functionalities familiar to BlackBerry Bold and Curve users on a secure and productive platform, with the added performance and agility that power professionals need to be competitive in today's busy world."