Featuring a textured soft touch back panel for outstanding grip and a professional feel. Given BlackBerry’s deliberately industrial design I think this overall thickness at 9.5mm is a welcome sacrifice to ensure things feel solid and it allows this phone to make its home within a bigger 2800mAh battery. That’s balanced by its 170g weight, and it’s solid construction without being uncomfortable to handle. Modern looking thanks to its edge-to-edge glass front with small bezels, and the frame textured for style and practical grip support.

Leap sports a 5-inch, 720p 1280 x 720 pixels LCD display with a pixel density of 294 ppi. Granted these are modest numbers compared to competitors’ 1080p offerings but the display offers excellent visibility under direct sunlight and achieved brightness levels of up to 600 nits. Most importantly, the color reproduction of the screen is quite impressive, representing colors accurately, which makes text crisp and readable-a feature important to business users who spend considerable time reading emails and documents.

The one surefire standout with Leap is its battery performance: that 2800mAh battery consistently pushes out as many as 25 hours of heavy use, handily beating the majority of its class. That’s accomplished with great power management and optimization of the Qualcomm MSM 8960 dual-core 1.5GHz processor. It’s not going to take home any benchmark crowns, but it performs well for business applications and general multitasking.

On paper, the 8MP rear camera with LED flash and 2MP front-facing camera might seem quite modest, but they house several business-focused features. For instance, the back houses document scanning optimization and business card recognition capabilities. Under office lighting conditions, it does exceptionally well: images are clear and detailed enough for document capture and video conferencing. Low-light shooting, however, exposes its limitations with increased noise and reduced detail.

Powered by BlackBerry 10.3.1 OS Leap offers certain security advantages among which are the improved encryption of personal and work data provided by BlackBerry Balance. It features built-in malware protection and secure boot process verification. Of course, BlackBerry Hub remains the trophy of the show - unified communications management that still blows other platforms out of the water.

Leap Wi-Fi supports 2.4 and 5GHz, the mobile data 4G LTE speed up to 150Mpbs and the Bluetooth 4.0 LE. Enterprise users will also appreciate other additions of other upgrades, including Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast for presentations. The device also keeps compatibility with BES12, making it a very good choice for organizations using BlackBerry’s enterprise services.

The most major blemish is the ageing processor architecture, which may introduce occasional lag when resource-hungry applications are operated. The Amazon Appstore offers access to Android apps, yet its selection is more limited than what’s available via Google Play. There is no wireless charging and also no NFC, which could slightly disappoint some users, given its orientation towards business use as well.

Clearly, BlackBerry Leap has kept business functionality and security in mind, rather than hankering after the most up-to-date specifications. It probably won’t appeal to consumers looking for the latest and greatest in multimedia or gaming performance, but as a business-oriented device, it does its job: solid performance, fantastic battery life, and enterprise-class security. It’s successful because it knows its target market and serves it, rather than trying to compete with mainstream consumer smartphones.