BlackBerry Z30 review

Battery life

The BlackBerry Z30 is packing a 2,880mAh battery. Although you can remove the back cover, you can't remove the battery, so there's no carrying a spare. From our time with the Z30 it seems unlikely that you'll need to. This phone can really go the distance.

BlackBerry quotes up to 18 hours of talk time and up to 16 days on standby. That actually sounds plausible.

We did our 90 minute video test and it barely put a dent in the battery. After using it quite heavily for a mixture of video, music, browsing, calls, and games the Z30 was still ticking at the end of the day.

It should certainly see you through a normal day's use with change, and you may even make it a couple of days between charges. Battery life is definitely one of the strengths of the Z30.

Connectivity

There's nothing obvious missing in this department. The BlackBerry Z30 supports quad band LTE, HSPA, and GSM/GPRS/EDGE. There's also dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and it can serve as a 4G mobile hotspot. Throw Bluetooth 4.0 LE, A-GPS and NFC into the mix and you have a well-connected device.

Your DLNA options are built in to the relevant Pictures, Video, and Music apps, via the Play On option, or you can go into Settings and look for devices under Media Sharing. It's easy to use.

You also have the option of investing in a microHDMI to HDMI cable to plug your BlackBerry Z30 directly into your HDTV.

The only issue we encountered with connectivity was related to the Wi-Fi connection. On two occasions the Z30 dropped the Wi-Fi connection and switched to the mobile network, but the Wi-Fi icon was still full, as though Wi-Fi was on.

After restarting the phone it immediately reconnected, but this is a concern and it could lead to unnecessary data usage.