BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9983 luxury smartphone

“The Porsche Design P’9983 from BlackBerry is crafted from premium materials and runs BlackBerry 10.3”

BlackBerry and Porsche, which have a history of working together on special edition devices, have collaborated to launch a new smartphone running BlackBerry 10.3. In true luxury smartphone tradition, the device gets a rather long (but posh) moniker – the Porsche Design P’9983 from BlackBerry.

As expected, the phone is crafted from premium materials, including a sapphire glass camera lens, a forged stainless steel chassis and floating Porche Design logo, and a glass weave material for the back panel.

Sporting the classic BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard, the P’9983 gets “glass-like” keys with silver font characters. BlackBerry says the keyboard is made of a durable synthetic material, designed to withstand wear and tear.

Coming to the core specs, the P’9983 features a 3.1-inch square touchscreen display, with a resolution of 720 x 720 pixels. It’s powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 processor, coupled with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. There’s a microSD card slot for expansion up to 128GB, USB 2.0 for charging and data transfers, and micro-HDMI for hooking up your smartphone to projector or an external screen such as a television or monitor. Handling the photography is an 8-megapixel primary camera with flash, and a 2MP front camera. There’s a 2,100mAh battery to fuel the phone, which reportedly offers 14 hours of talktime on 3G, and up to 8.1 hours of video playback. Connectivity options include LTE/3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, GPS and NFC.

Coming to the software, the smartphone comes loaded with the usual BlackBerry 10 features, including word prediction and auto-correction for the keyboard, encrypted BBM instant messaging, and the BlackBerry Priority Hub to display important messages and notifications. For those of you who like to make a statement, you might be pleased to know that the regular BlackBerry pin has been replaced by an exclusive Porsche Design PIN range – 2AAXXXXX. For apps and games, you’ll have access to BlackBerry World, as well as a large selection of Android apps, thanks to BlackBerry's partnership with the Amazon Appstore.

In the retail box, BlackBerry is including a premium stereo headset, an international charging kit, a polishing cloth to keep your phone nice and shiny, and a USB cable. You can also customise your device with a range of handcrafted Italian leather back covers in colours like Yellow, Blue Green, Dark Brown, Pomegranate, Paloma Grey, Salsa, Blue and Orange.

The P’9983 will be available from Porsche Design stores and select retailers around the world by the beginning of October. The price hasn't been announced yet, but don’t expect to pay anything less than a bomb.