Gadgetory

now blackberry or the artist formerly known as research in motion might have kicked off the smartphone era but in the intervening years it has seen a significant decline now that the new BlackBerry 10 platform is kicking off let's see how it compares to other modern smartphone platforms I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is BlackBerry 10 versus Android so as you can see we're using a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 as our Android device and the differences between these two platforms are extreme and they start right at the lock screen whereas on Android you have to press a physical button to wake up the device you the power standby key or the home button on blackberry you can do that you do have that option but as we just discussed in our first impressions video you can also just swipe up from the bottom to remove the lock screen so that is pretty cool we like that a lot but Android does give you a bit more versatility you can unlock it sort of from anywhere bottom or top and if you are running a skin on top of Android you probably have a whole lot of lock screen action options like TouchWiz gives you on Samsung whereas with blackberry not much going on you just have your peek at your notifications there your recent events it actually looks a lot like Windows Phone 8 which we'll talk about in our next video but you just have to swipe up in the bottom if you try and swipe it for anywhere else the device is like what are you what are you trying to do to me I don't I don't understand and if you get it wrong enough it'll finally tell you listen you got to come down here so there that is moving on to one of the principle reasons for smartphone is notifications on Android you with a familiar persistent notification shade which you can pull down and that shows all your messages in an aggregate list and if you want to take a peek inside you can just do the two finger pull down if you're on jellybean or later there's a whole bunch of stuff in there you've got weather widgets and Samsung's TouchWiz has included some toggles along the top for handy quick settings changes so that's Android and then put on blackberry go ahead and unlock there we are doing something a little bit different pull up from the bottom we can peek right at our notifications there to see if any of them are things we want to deal with and if they are then we just continue that action slide it across and we have our blackberry hub which aggregates everything together in a similar fashion and then there's one more layer to this we can pull this over and you can see or your Gmail your text messages your Twitter all that kind of stuff right over there and if you want to say you just want to come on over and hop into say text messages then you absolutely can do that and to get out of that compose view you'll notice there is no back button just as there is no home button on the back of the BlackBerry you just swipe to go back to where you were takes a little getting used to but once you are used to it it ain't no thing now Google being the leader in search that it is you might expect that Android is a pretty good on device search functionality and you would be correct from the home screen you can just tap on the Google bar or wherever you choose to put the Google bar and search for say pocket now that you didn't see that one coming the device will search the web for pocket now in the standard Google search of course but you can also come on down here and search the phone which will give you contacts as well as any other indication of the phone now I use the pocket now word very frequently on my device as you might imagine but Android is only giving me results for my contacts and for Chrome where I have browsed to pocket now pages I'm not seeing anything else and that holds true on our Nexus 7 as well executing the same search on blackberry you as you can see it's a recently used item but this persistent search button is down here as well when this bar is visible in the home screen and we can go ahead and do a search for pocket now on the blackberry and see what that looks like as you can see I don't need to hit enter or anything like that the divided the results come up as I type here are my contacts here my browser results but I also am getting results from inside my messages where the word pocket now has been used and then I can extend the search down here to other apps - such as blackberry app world maps application Google etc what about launching an app everybody's talking about apps apps apps and apps are so important so how do you launch them well on Android of course you have your groupings of folders if you like on your home screen which you can tap or you just have a standalone apps sitting there like mobile hotspot you tap it you go ahead and jump right into that hit back to go back to the home screen or hit the home button go to the home screen or you can just go into the app drawer and on your app launcher here you have all your apps laid out in a grid it is all fairly standard and it works fairly well you can also launch an app though by tapping the search bar on an Android device and say you want to launch Foursquare you just start typing it at autocompletes you go ahead and tap Foursquare and then it jumps right in on the blackberry the story is similar once we get past the lockscreen you're in an application grid here if you're in the grid you can go ahead and just tap on any app you like say let's just go into Foursquare to be consistent the app pops up like that that's a little different there we don't seem to be able to launch the Foursquare app from a text search on the device so that is different if you frequently launch apps by typing in their names you will have some getting used to to do on the blackberry but there's yet another way of launching apps on these devices and that is multitasking so on Android if we hop past the homescreen and say we're in an app like Twitter and we want to go ahead and jump into Foursquare on regular Android we would go ahead and press the multitasking key on the galaxy note 2 we'll press and hold the home button and we're in our multitasking ribbon which shows recently used apps and go ahead and just tap it and go right into Foursquare there by contrast on the blackberry once we get past the launch screen here I recently used apps are front and center this is the first page of the home page and you can vertically scroll through your running apps this way you have of course your app launching tray to the right here with its cascading icons but the principle screen is the apps you've run recently in the apps which are running so you don't need to take an extra step these apps are already here we can just tap on Foursquare and we're right in there if you want to get rid of one of them you just tap the X to clear it it's not necessarily a better way of multitasking it depends on your school thought it's just different it certainly is more efficient if you do use many of the same apps all the time now let's say you wanted to send an email from either of these devices on Android you just go ahead and hop into the Gmail app I have already started an email just to illustrate that but that's your fairly standard you hop into the email app to send an email on blackberry you'd think it would be the same way when you're on your home screen here no you can hop on over to the app tray but no you do not come over here to do your email you hop to the left go into the hub and of course here's your recent messages if you want to you can hop on over here and choose which mailbox you want to use choose where you want to compose or much much easier just hop down here hit compose and then you can choose what application you'd like to use to send your email finally to wrap it up it wouldn't be a comparison if we didn't look at the respective app stores so let's start with Android and have a look at our old friend the Google Play Store which features I don't know why I had to really to the Terms of Service maybe because I switched countries which features apps in addition to content all arranged in a linear feet in a linear fashion you can swipe from left to right to go into different categories and top categories and so on and you can search directly for an app right here so let's say we're searching for a particular app called tricorder because we are nerds there a our scientific sci-fi scanner sounds delightful and hit install and then it you have to agree to the terms it tells you what permissions that the app is going to require and how compromised it's going to make your security you can accept and download and then it downloads in the background it gives the option to keep shopping which we can now do if we were in the Google Play Store and in the United States we can search for an awesome band called pinback but we don't have access to that content here in Canada for some reason so we'll have to leave that for a more detailed comparison let's go ahead and buy an app in the new BlackBerry app world which I actually have not done this will be my first time seeing this I'm show off to agree and user License Agreement and some such this is the first time load oh maybe not well here we go look at these oh well this is a very nice layout here so we have a featured app up top as well as trending apps and games down below a section for top paid games top paid apps it looks like we can search down here well so let's say we want to search for I'm sure there will be no response for tricorder BB sensors tricorder environments well I'm completely wrong this is using the sensor capabilities your device to scan your unease well that sounds like fun I'm gonna go ahead and download that download starting go ahead the progress bar is proceeding up top now I can go back and I can do other things while this is installing I believe is what was is what was said today and then if you go down lower okay here we have our content our top movies our top TV episodes I wonder if they feature the awesome band pinned back yes that rocks anyway more on that as we get more detailed but for now it's just a quick look between blackberry 10 and Android jelly bean here in Toronto once again Michael from pocket now stay tuned for a lot more