Gadgetory

it's been a long time since new BlackBerry OS has seen the light of day but here it is blackberry 10 and it's pretty good too I'm Jessica dual-core with CNN and i'm going to show you what's good what's bad and how to get around the first thing to know is that rims new operating system is completely gesture-based you swipe left right up and down to access most menus and submenus to check your email and also to close apps I'm not going to lie to you finding your way around can take a little bit of getting used to especially the gesture to close an app which is basically just pulling up from the bottom of the screen to minimize it you can store up to eight open apps this way you'll also find that you're using a gesture to wake the screen from its slumber and that's just by dragging up so let me take you through the screens themselves rim winds up your essentials in a row with your apps laid out in the icons to the right but if you swipe over toward the left you'll see your active windows if you have any open and those are the thumbnails of your running apps if you keep swiping left again you'll find blackberry hub which shows you your email messages missed calls and social networking notifications pretty much everything you see is customizable you can make folders and rearrange the app order you can change what you see in hub you can also peek at the hub from any time from any screen pretty much with just one little gesture it is possible to get lost in all dis gesturing around at first but like most mobile platforms it doesn't take too long to figure out the flow rim spent a lot of time on the virtual keyboard and it shows blackberry 10 has some strong word prediction that's built into most apps and you can customize where you want those words to appear either the top or scattered throughout the keyboard you can also select up to three languages for the keyboard to remember at one time plus rim put a lot of thought into how people copy and paste text how they add extra characters and how they delete a few words at a time despite rims effort certain things like highlighting a paragraph for example are either overcomplicated or not quite as intuitive as I'd like now blackberry messenger is another rim claim to fame and in this update it's the best it's ever been you can use NFC to get new contacts in real I'm like if they're standing right in front of you and in addition to free messaging one-on-one or with group you can now do voice and video calls as well only did one test call so far and it worked great stop me if you've seen this one before a digital voice assistant that talks back to you yeah i think that blackberry 10 siri-like voice control app is basically rim getting back at Apple for using blackberry messenger as its I message inspiration the app does helpfully give you a list of things that you can do but it isn't as flexible Syrian what you can say and it sounds a lot more robotic searching the internet for peanut butter brownie recipes overall rim did a great job making blackberry 10 look polished and professional while still keeping the look familiar for long time fans I like that the gestures really support one-handed operation though that really depends on the size of the screen and the shape of the phone as well I also like the simplicity of some of the corporate security apps as well as bedtime mode which turns off every bit of buzz except for your morning alarm and i also just love Universal Search which I've always loved and I like BlackBerry's built-in photo editing tool however a few things don't work as well as i'd like the weaker maps app doesn't use google maps and it doesn't have walking or transit directions the cameras time shift mode is really cool but it's a bummer that it isn't built into the main camera option i also feel like rim could have added HDR and panorama modes by now blackberry 10 OS as the result of years spent overhauling an outdated operating system and making it new and modern again without losing its former identity and that i think room was completely successful i think that blackberry fans are for the most part really going to like what they see however the OS does have a bit of a learning curve and some of the weaker apps like mapping are going to keep some people on their current os's I'm Jessica doll court and that's your overview of blackberry 10 there's a lot more to uncover so keep your eye out for more blackberry 10 videos right here on cnet TV and read the full blackberry 10 OS review on cnet you