BlackBerry Leap review: Bouncing up and down

Performance

BlackBerry Leap runs on the very dated but popular in its familiy Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Play MSM8960 chipset with a 1.5GHz dual-core Scorpion CPU, Adreno 225 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. Qualcomm took the wraps off the MSM8960 in the distant 2011 - the year BlackBerry Bold 9900 launched, so don't expect any miracles from it.

We put the BlackBerry Leap through the paces of several hardware benchmarks, compatible with the Android API. Unsurprisingly, the results came out pedestrian by today's standards. See for yourself below.

AnTuTu 5

Higher is better

• BlackBerry Passport
  35173
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  20616
• BlackBerry Classic
  18851
• BlackBerry Leap
  17724

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

• BlackBerry Passport
  628
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  509
• Nokia Lumia 830
  478
• BlackBerry Classic
  168
• BlackBerry Leap
  150

Basemark OS II (single-core)

Higher is better

• BlackBerry Passport
  2061
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  1414
• BlackBerry Leap
  1225
• BlackBerry Classic
  1160

Basemark OS II (multi-core)

Higher is better

• BlackBerry Passport
  9916
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  5313
• BlackBerry Leap
  2559
• BlackBerry Classic
  2526

Web browsing benchmarks test JavaScript and HTML5 performance. The scores of BlackBerry Leap were once again far from impressive. We tried installing Google Chrome, but it was incompatible with the Leap.

Kraken 1.1

Lower is better

• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  13694
• BlackBerry Passport
  14624
• Nokia Lumia 830
  26542
• BlackBerry Leap
  26742
• BlackBerry Classic
  28732

BrowserMark 2.1

Higher is better

• BlackBerry Passport
  1030
• BlackBerry Leap
  670
• BlackBerry Classic
  634
• Nokia Lumia 830
  599
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
  549

As you can see above, BlackBerry Classic is hardly a device to smash through benchmarks with. Its real life performance isn't perfect either. While the QNX-based BlackBerry OS 10.3.1 is smooth and responsive, we witnessed some lag and way too long loading times on some apps.

It's also worth pointing out that the smartphone slows down when running some of today's popular Android apps, so don't expect the same performance as when those run natively.