While visiting at Waterloo this week, I caught up with BlackBerry's Michael Clewley who showed me around some of the more prominent features on the new BlackBerry Z30. Obviously the 5-inch screen demands a lot of attention, but there's a lot more going on than just increased size. The S-Stripe pixel layout makes text particularly sharp, which is a must when enjoying longer web pages and e-mails on the big screen. BlackBerry's Jeff Gadway chimed in and said that the Z30 performs particularly well in the realm of contrast versus the competition with an NTSC ratio of 101%. With stuff like this, BlackBerry isn't feeling too intimidated by pixel density wars. 

Audio is a big part of the Z30 as well, not only by way of its external speaker system, but also there are four microphones around which provide what BlackBerry calls Natural Sound for BBM Voice and Video calls (and obviously high quality for cellular HD voice calls as well).

Battery life gets a shout-out, as well it should. The integrated 2880 mAh battery can apparently handle 25 hours of regular usage. There are a few things helping here, namely a new antennae set-up which isn't always scanning for a signal (only when it senses you're in ideal circumstances), and intelligently decides when to do so in low coverage areas. They're also using a new kind of OLED display which consumes less power than usual. BlackBerry was also picked a quad-core graphics processor, but shied away from quad-core CPU in order to save on battery life. Overall, the Z30 is getting 70% more battery life than the Z10, and 25% more than the Galaxy S4 under the same circumstances. 

It's interesting to see BlackBerry pitching the Z30 as a productivity workhorse, but the battery life alone is enough for me to buy that pitch. What do you guys think? Is the Z30 doing enough that's new to grab the attention of Android or iPhone owners? Any Z10 owners going to upgrade to this bad boy when it comes out? 

Check out more on the BlackBerry Z30