BlackBerry Z30 – Apps and Games

The poor apps and games selection of the BlackBerry Z30 is much harder to accept, though.

BlackBerry World is the portal through which you download apps on the BlackBerry Z30. Navigating through it is fine – the basic structure of the store is on the device, leaving just the app icons to be pulled down through the mobile internet/Wi-Fi connection. However, its range of content is far worse than the iPhone App Store.

Spotify? Not there. Instagram?  MIA. Candy Crush Saga? You can download guides for the game, but the game itself? Not a chance.

The relative paucity of apps and games on offer (and the need to offset porting costs for a small audience) has seen some app prices sky rocket. For example, Galaxy on Fire 2 costs £7.

If you’re not used to the relative wealth of apps and games on other platforms, you may be satisfied enough. The early BlackBerry 10 push has seen a bunch of quality programs released for BlackBerry phones like the Z30 – including Gameloft’s Modern Combat 4 and Bard’s Tale. There’s just not much, and we don’t expect a great deal of note to be added.

BlackBerry Z30 – Performance

The BlackBerry Z30 has a dual-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon Pro CPU, which uses Krait cores – the same type seen in the Google Nexus 4. As seen in the phone’s screen technology, the BlackBerry Z30 processor isn’t a match those of the top phones.

Comparing performance between platforms is really the preserve of the tech-head who cares more about specs than what a phone’s really like to use, though.

The BlackBerry Z30’s performance is good. It’s not the fastest system to use – a gesture-based system is always going to be held back by the distances you need to move your thumb – but there’s no serious lag.

And when the Z30’s gaming library is poor, there’s little reason to make GPU performance a big consideration in your buying decision.

We did try out a few more neutral tests that tell us a bit more about the Z30’s power. In the Peacekeeper HTML5 benchmark, the phone scores 401. That’s on-par with the iPhone 4S and HTC One X – pretty old phones.

The Sunspider Javascript benchmark took the BlackBerry Z30 1135ms to complete, which is a little slower than the Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 (which attain sub-1000ms scores), but far quicker than either the HTC One X or iPhone 4S. It roughly determines how quickly java-based websites will load.

Comparing these results gives you a good indication of what the BlackBerry Z30 is like. It doesn’t have masses and masses of power on tap (as tested by an HTML 5 benchmark), but the efficiency of BlackBerry 10 means most people won’t notice.