The Q5 was the third BlackBerry 10 OS device. It echoed the traditional BlackBerry device formula, featuring a hardware qwerty keyboard similar to that on legacy BlackBerry Curve devices.
In a clear effort to achieve consistency across devices, particularly for application development, the Q5 matched the
BlackBerry Q10 with its 3.1-inch, 720 x 720 resolution display, although it used LCD rather than AMOLED technology. Cost savings had also been made in other areas such as storage (8GB versus 16GB on the Q10), processor (1.2 GHz dual-core versus 1.5 GHz dual-core), and camera (five megapixels versus eight megapixels). There was no HDMI-out support, the casing used cheaper materials and the Q5 had a non-removable battery. BlackBerry offered both HSPA+ and LTE variants of the Q5 and a model without NFC.