Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with a review of the BlackBerry z10 now BlackBerry's pretty much started from scratch here not only is it's a brand new phone but it's also a brand new operating system so is it any good to start with let's take a look at the design the z10 is quite similar in size to the iPhone 5 which while much smaller than most Android phones is a nice size for a lot of people the front looks a bit awkward with large bezels on top and bottom of the screen however it's a good-looking phone and the backing is made out of a very nice feeling soft touch textured finish it's also removable giving you access to the battery along with the SIM card and microSD card slots while it's mostly made of plastic the z10 feels solid and well built in the hand with the volume rocker and mute button placed on the right side and the lock button and headphone jack up top the 4.2 inch screen also looks fantastic with incredibly sharp detail although it is lacking a bit in brightness specs are also decent with a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM along with 16 gigabytes of storage it's definitely not going to be winning any style awards but it ended up quite liking the simple understated design of the phone now you're getting a look at what the video looks like from the front facing camera on the z10 as well as what the audio sounds like in video mode so this also has another camera it's an 8 megapixel shooter around back and while the pictures don't imply anything all that's special they're a decent and they do match up pretty well with other high-end smartphones on the market right now the video is also good nothing spectacular overall it's got good Christmas clarity motion all that kind of fun stuff where things get interesting is when you start the phone up gone is the old BlackBerry OS replaced by BlackBerry 10 which is a massive change the interface takes some getting used to but it's fairly well laid out you have your most recent apps listed on the main screen the rest of your apps over on the other pages and the BlackBerry hub behind it swipe from the left these are your notifications along with email and texts rolled into one it's an interesting idea that allows you to get to your important stuff quickly however it can get cluttered if you've got a lot of emails tweets etc instead of having a home button bb10 relies on gestures to get around which is actually a very natural way of doing it swipe up from the bottom to close an app and a swipe from the top will pull up a quick settings menu or specific app settings depending on where you are you can also unlock the phone quickly by swiping all the way up even when the screen is off which is something I really loved that's not to say it's perfect however as with any brand new OS there are glitches and rough edges around the phone rebooted randomly a couple times and the browser locked up occasionally needing a force close most of the OS relies on a swipe from the left gesture to go back however sometimes you have to use a button which just doesn't make sense to the user nothing ever amounted to a deal-breaker and I'm willing to bet most things will be sorted soon but overall it does leave an impression of being not quite fully baked on the other hand sometimes bb10 absolutely nails it the browser is easily among the best on any platform with snappy loading times quick scrolling and even flash built-in it's definitely nice to see this although I should warn you the viewing Flash content trains the battery laughably fast the keyboard is also excellent the autocomplete is very smart and you can even flick words up if it predicts correctly for you most of the default apps are solid including the surprisingly great story maker which will take your images and video and create a custom video for you that's actually very nicely done unfortunately app support is probably the biggest problem here there are quite a few apps in blackberry world but most are just plain bad there's also a lot missing such as Skype Netflix Instagram and Spotify just to name a few as it's a brand new ecosystem I'm sure more apps will be coming but right now the selection is really limiting you can side load some Android apps but they're really not a good solution the battery life is also seriously lacking with moderate use it would just make it through a normal day for me but if this were my main phone I would always keep a spare battery on me the BlackBerry z10 is a surprisingly good phone a lot of what it does it does very well and while the hardware isn't anything all that special it does get the job done unfortunately where it runs into issues is with the BlackBerry 10 operating system but simply there are a lot of rough edges here and for the most part the app support is just very very disappointing while the z10 is definitely an interesting phone unfortunately there's just not a whole lot here that will make me want to recommend it over something running iOS or Android I'm curious to know what do you guys think is this something that you would ever switch to or do you think it's just not quite fully baked yet definitely be sure to let me know what you think in the comments below if you're interested more feel free to check out my last video where I got a hands on of the brand new Samsung Galaxy s4 if you enjoyed definitely be sure to leave this video a thumbs up and if you're interested in more videos like this be sure to subscribe anyway guys next time