BlackBerry Classic Price Revealed, Pre-Orders Open

BlackBerry has finally put its much-anticipated Classic smartphone up for pre-orders, pricing it at $499 (roughly Rs. 30,800), and announced the handset will be launched on December 17.

"Hot on the heels of a highly successful enterprise event in San Francisco, I'm excited to announce that you can officially pre order BlackBerry Classic today," confirmed Donny Halliwell, Social Media Marketing lead at BlackBerry and Editor for the Inside BlackBerry blogs, on the company's blog post.

Notably, the BlackBerry Classic's full list of specifications has not yet been released by the company, and Halliwell says these details along with global availability will be announced at launch.

The BlackBerry Classic smartphone is inspired by the popular Bold range of smartphones. The pre-order listing, while keeping the handset specifications under cover, adds the smartphone to feature its traditional keyboard and navigation keys, a touchscreen display, fast web-browsing, the ability to install both Android and BlackBerry apps, and 4G LTE connectivity.

The BlackBerry Classic will run on the BB10.3.1 OS, and will only be available unlocked and not include any contract signing with network carriers in the US, namely Verizon, Sprint and US Cellular.

BlackBerry launched the Passport in late-September, and brought it to India the same month for Rs. 49,990. Some of the key specifications of the handset are 4.5-inch 1440x1440 pixel resolution IPS LCD display; three-line hardware keyboard with capacitive touch sensitivity; 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor with Adreno 330 GPU; 3GB of RAM; 32GB of inbuilt storage that's expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB); a 13-megapixel rear OIS camera with a BSI sensor; a 2-megapixel front camera, and a 3450mAh battery.