Nokia XL vs. BlackBerry Z30 – Mobile Madness

Yesterday’s match-up between the Sony Xperia Z2 and the Nokia Lumia 1520 was fairly close. While the previous match-ups were complete blow-outs (30%+ differece), this round was less lopsided, with the Sony Xperia Z2 advancing to the next round. In fact many users may be surprised the Lumia 1520 stuck closely again Sony’s new flagship phone. It is quite telling how far along the Windows Phone platform has come along, and even more telling how Nokia really hit it out of the park with the Lumia 1520. That being said we’ll see the Sony Xperia Z2 go head-to-head against the winner of today’s match up.

Today’s match up pits the Nokia XL vs. the BlackBerry Z30. You can see our hands-on with both devices below. Nokia just announced the Nokia XL merely weeks ago during Mobile World Congress. Here at TechnoBuffalo, we’ve always been fans of Nokia hardware and wondered what it would look like paired with an Android device. Well here it is, and it’s the bigger, smarter sibling to the Nokia X and X+. The Nokia XL sports a 5-inch display, 5MP camera and distinctive Nokia design. The BlackBerry Z30 too sports a 5-inch screen and offers to claim up to 25 hours of battery life. While BlackBerry has taken a beating against the competition, it still boasts strong enterprise tools and is still the preferred smartphone for many business focused individuals (and IT Managers).

So which device do you see winning this round? The Nokia XL or the BlackBerry Z30? You decide.

Nokia XL

Nokia XL Hands-On

It has the most power and the largest display, and we think most folks are going to want to pick this up over the other models. It runs the same forked version of Android, though it’s AOSP so you can load other Android apps. The big trade-off is that you don’t have access to Google Play Services, and instead have to rely on Nokia’s Android app store and music offerings.

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Nokia XL Hands-On

5-inch, 800 x 480 pixel display (187 ppi)
Android
1GHZ Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core processor
768MB
4GB

Full Specs

BlackBerry Z30

BlackBerry Z30 Unboxing

Its size and design looks terrific, and it feels quite good in the hand. The screen, which is 5 inches, isn’t Full HD, but it still looks fantastic; BlackBerry 10, meanwhile, looks much more suited to the larger display. Other specs include 2GB of RAM, 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, 2,880mAh battery, 8-megapixel camera, 16GB of internal storage (microSD expandable) and NFC.

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