BlackBerry Z30 Arriving Next Month Exclusively on Verizon

Verizon has announced that the BlackBerry Z30 is heading to its network at some point next month. Furthermore, the device will only be available on Verizon (at least during launch), making it a bit difficult to get the new BlackBerry flagship handset if you’re not on Big Red, but the carrier hopes users will switch over in order to get it.

The Z30 was announced last month, and it will start at $199 after signing a new two-year contract, or you can go with Verizon’s Edge plans and pay just $22.91 per month for 24 months. Unfortunately, that’s all the information that Verizon spilled on us; we now at least know that the Z30 will hit the US sometime in November, but the exact date is still up in the air, and we expect the carrier to announce a release date in a couple weeks.

There doesn’t seem to be any pre-orders for the device either, so if you’re wanting BlackBerry’s latest handset, you’ll have to take your chances and wait in line for it like the iPhone 5s. However, we don’t think the lines will be as long as what we saw on September 20 when the iPhone 5s was released. BlackBerry has been struggling to grow its userbase, and it hopes to do that with the Z30.

The Z30 sports a larger 5-inch 720p display and has a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor on the inside. It also comes with a huge 2880mAh battery, which is the largest battery that BlackBerry has ever put in one of its devices, and the new phone is running the company’s new BlackBerry 10.2 operating system.

While the display does has a lower pixel-density than the Z10, consumers will still get almost 300ppi out of the new display, which almost meets the iPhone’s 326ppi, but it’s nowhere close to the HTC One’s 4.7-inch full 1080p display.

On the software side, BlackBerry 10.2 includes a handful of features over BlackBerry 10.1, including enhancements made to the BlackBerry Hub, which now has a new Priority Hub feature that learns what users respond to most, and then presents them with notification ranked from most important to least important. 10.2 also includes improvements to BBM, such as previews of messages that pop up on the screen. Aside from the Z30, BlackBerry 10.2 is also compatible with the Z10, Q10 and Q5.