Gadgetory

it's no secret that's blackberry as a tech company has not had the easiest time of it in recent years we almost lost it might completely disappear from the consumer market but blackberry is back with a new device it's very different but is it also very special with me is my CNET colleague Andrew Hoyle hi Luke now Andy you've been using the BlackBerry prove a week and we're going to talk about your findings so first of all what is the thing that strikes you most about the phone well the headline of this phone really is that it's the first BlackBerry phone to run Android Google's operating system rather than BlackBerry's own bb10 and of course the big thing is app selection suddenly you've got hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from all your favorite games all your social networks everything you want on this phone blackberry 10 didn't have that this is big news for blackberry and is it so does it actually make a difference that it's running Android what's it like to use it's it's really easy to use it's very much the same as any other Android phone you would have used before so you've got multiple home screens you go into an app selection folder so you like the fact that it's running Android I think it's great so this phone doesn't look like what you expect a black bear phone to look like it's got a very very different very bold design you might say tell me you've been using it for a week does the design work or is it a failure I love a design I think it's great you've got a big screen 5.5 inches you've got carbon-fiber weave on the back my favorite thing though and you're like this luke is that the screen slides up to reveal this keyboard beneath the phone moves it transforms and it's snappy it reminds me of the old Motorola RAZR v3 from the early noughties the clamshell that you can snap shut we've got that physicality back in a phone this movement I have missed that and I'm so glad to see something like that back would you use this phone a black be proved ahead of any other phone that's currently out there that is a difficult one to say I use an iPhone most of the time and I'm pretty entrenched in Apple's ecosystem have been a lot of money on apps the word I personally switch to this phone know if I was switching from another Android phone definitely and I think a lot of Android users are going to be very keen to try out this phone and certainly people who love BlackBerry's physical keyboards they're going to love to use this as well so it sounds like if you are an Android fan then this might be worth checking out one last thing though Andy the name it's terrible blackberry print it food it's a ridiculous name though they could have picked anything else and it would have been better okay well we have much more on the blackberry proof at cnet.com so be sure to check it out