Please pardon the bad pun in the title, I'm a sucker for them.

Okay, so this is going to seem kind of like a weird article considering not all that long ago, I made a post saying that yes, design is important in phones. However, just because a design looks good doesn't magically make the rest of the phone work well. Yes, (in my opinion) the HTC One has the best design I have ever seen in an Android smartphone, but I wouldn't like it if the phone didn't run well, which (thankfully) it does. But I'm not writing this article to talk about the HTC One, for once.

I'm talking about that leaked Porsche Design BlackBerry Z10 device. And all I have to ask is... why?

Not that I shouldn't have expected it, the Porsche Design thing isn't something that's new to BlackBerry. We've also seen the Porsche Design P'9981 that was released last year, which was essentially fancy housing placed on the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and cost $2,000. The phone looked premium, but it certainly didn't act premium, and even making it one of The Verge's worst reviewed phones of 2012. That's not to say there isn't a market for these things, because there are a lot of people who have more money than they know what to with, and why not blow it on a fancified BlackBerry device? But it's not really them that I'm worried about; it's BlackBerry.

BlackBerry just released BlackBerry 10 earlier this year, and to be quite honest, it hasn't been doing that great. There's a lot of things people expected, or at least wanted to see, from the revamped platform and for the most part they weren't met. Forget the fact that BlackBerry currently offers the least amount of apps in their app store compared to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, because that's completely understandable being that the platform only released earlier this year. In fact, BlackBerry 10 had an impressive amount of applications to start off with - over 70,000 - at launch, and now has over 120,000. Nice! Unfortunately, for most people numbers mean virtually nothing. If you don't feature a good host of mainstream applications, you can't expect any platform to do very well. To this day BlackBerry 10 still doesn't have Netflix, YouTube, Pandora... and a lot more. It's kind of making people upset. There's even an application that's called "Give Me That App!" which is described as such: "Tired of waiting for your favorite app or game to be available on  BlackBerry® 10?  Now you can take action with just a few taps." When your platform has a petition application to get better applications, you should know something is wrong.

But instead of spending the money to try and make these applications happen or towards something more productive, they're going to make a Porsche Design BlackBerry Z10. That'll bring in the masses.

I don't know. I could be wrong. I think the Z10 is a nice phone, but there's really no real reason to bring in the Porsche Design model right now if the rumor happens to be true. I can see the benefit of releasing the Q10 for the smartphone users that still use physical keyboards, and I can understand wanting to release the A10 to cater to phablet users, but to pimp out the Z10 just because you can does nothing for most people. I'm not saying they shouldn't ever make it, I'm just saying I think that BlackBerry needs to try and get its priorities straight.

"Hey, Jim! Nice phone! Is that leather on the back?"
"It sure is, George. Ain't she a beaut?"
"Very nice. Hey, did you see that new viral video on YouTube with the lemon-juicing bears? Hilarious, wasn't it?"
"No George, I haven't. If you'll just let me get out my iPad then I'm sure it will only take a moment..."

But hey, who needs a native YouTube application when you can have cow skin on the back of your phone?

Image via Pocket-Lint, Tinhte