Gadgetory

we saw a lot of cool stuff at this morning's blackberry ten announcement but if blackberry wants to take on the big players iOS and Android it has a third place contender to deal with first in the form of Microsoft's Windows Phone so let's see how it does that I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is blackberry 10 versus Windows Phone 8 ok so just like our blackberry versus Android comparison from just a couple hours ago the BlackBerry versus Windows Phone comparison starts at the lockscreen and the differences also start there but there are a lot more similarities in this example they both slide effectively from the bottom you really can't slide Windows Phone from the top to well and there are lots of cool similarities here we've got big time we've got in Windows Phone we've got big date and somewhat big daytime blackberry also got a preview of your events and a preview of your notifications in the peek over here and in the little notifications down here a big difference here is that Windows Phone just like any other operating system besides blackberry almost makes you unlock by pressing a physical button you can't press the home button you can't do anything and do anything fancy you just have to press that button and then unlock the screen with blackberry if you watched our Android video or our first hands-on you'll be familiar with this you can just drag a finger up from the bezel and you have unlocked your device which we think is pretty awesome next huge difference is going to be in notifications now this is a big sore spot on Windows Phone because there is no real Notification Center as we at pocket now and many other people have commented on in days weeks months and years past Microsoft is rumored to be working on one but it's just not there it's probably gonna live to the left of the home screen here you'll notice wiping and nothing is happening it's just begging for a Notification Center there but it is not there so for right now you have live tiles here with notification counts on each specific live tile you can arrange these tiles as you like but it's not a unified Notification Center it means always having to return to the home screen to check your note vacations the situation on blackberry really couldn't be any more different in addition to the peak functionality which lets you see your message counts from any app even if you're on the home screen i'm screen is one thing but if you're inside say the settings application you can just slide up and peek see if any of those are worth it - you know I don't really want to check any of those I'll go back to the app but if something does piqued your interest you can have peak I didn't mean to do that you can continue the movement just by dragging over to the right here and you have the BlackBerry hub now this is currently set to Twitter but I'm going to go ahead and hop into the hub itself and now this is a unified list of everything that I've built into the hub which includes email accounts Twitter account Facebook account etc etc and this is accessible from any point in the OS and then if you want you can filter those by say you know you can take them out of there out of it of its unified state but I like to keep it all together and BlackBerry has been very good at the unified inbox for a while also we would be negligent if we didn't point out BlackBerry's iconic flashing red notification indicator which lets you know when you have messages waiting when you've missed system events missed calls or something like that Windows Phone this particular Windows Phone the achieve Odyssey does not support a notification LED but more than that even windows phones with LEDs do not typically use them for notifications they're only for charging indicators so all that's taken together we usually don't choose winners or losers in these early comparisons but we have to say blackberry really has notifications in the bag in this particular comparison so what about local search well on Windows Phone 8 there is no local search you noticed there is dedicated search button which takes you to bing which is a really nice shortcut there and you can search the internet for say something like pocket now for all your smartphone and tablet news needs but it only searches the web and if we look we can do we can get local results and that's nice we get media and photos of our logo and stuff and you buy shopping I guess I guess we have something to do with women's lacrosse I don't know but there is no local results at all you cannot search the device if you want to search the device for a con to go into the people hub if you want to search for something in Foursquare you have to jump into Foursquare jump into Facebook you have to go and you have this very siloed experience on Windows Phone if you're searching for something you have to make sure you're in the right place before you start your search that is not at all the case on BlackBerry 10 if you'll notice if you unlock the device you have a search option here front and center very similar to the Bing shortcut there and that persists whether you're in the app drawer or in the homescreen it does go away if you hop into an app but that is always accessible via the hub functionality and actually we started a search there but there it is down down below you can do a search and we'll go ahead and do pocket now once again let's see what kind of results we get now if we spell it right we get much better results now boom and there we have all of our mail all of our contacts with pocket now in the name any mention of pocket now on the device there's just a bevy of results there which is very very handy and then of course you can filter your search as you see fit we're having all kinds of complicated conversations about device features here let's just do something simple and launch an app so on Windows Phone you'll notice the home screen ribbon here you these live tiles are not just indicators for notifications but they're also shortcuts to apps let's just hop into Foursquare because that's what we did last time there's a splash screen and the app goes ahead and starts now we since we have no system search we can't search for an app and just jump right into it but that's a very simple way of doing it come back to the home screen and there and that is to do the same thing on blackberry 10 of course we have a couple different choices we can just hop into the app drawer and tap on the app and launch it and that's just fine but you'll notice it is also right there because it's one of our recently used apps on the home screen here so if it's an app you use all the time like say Foursquare you jump it around and check it in places and it's always there because you're want people to know where you are you just go ahead and tap it right from there and you can launch it from there or if for some reason that's not there you can't find it you don't want to you really like typing things you just go ahead and type Foursquare and there it finds it in the application it finds a contact about Foursquare it finds messages relating to Foursquare and you expand that search if you want to but really I just want to open the app boom just like that now we covered a little bit about multitasking on the Windows Phone side of things this is your ribbon of recently run apps and if you want to cancel them you can go ahead and press the X and that will disappear and rearrange that and we jumped back into there and we can go ahead and cancel a phone app and then if you want to hop into one you just tap on it and that's nice Windows Phone offers a similar arrangement requires you to press and hold on the back button and then you get this card like ribbon of recently used apps however it doesn't give you the functionality to close them and if you want to close apps instead of just tombstoning them in memory you actually have to kind of spam the back key until you you can do this one at a time or you can just spam it until you can't go any further you're back home key and that means nothing the home screen I mean nothing is running in the background with blackberry you can just manage it right here because the task switcher is a core component of the OS which is pretty cool and it's something we really haven't seen since the webOS days so these are philosophically different platforms Windows Phone 8 emphasizes simplicity and minimalistic design whereas blackberry 10 places a much higher priority on functionality at the expense of intuitive Ness so there is a higher learning curve on the BlackBerry device which one will ultimately come out on top as anyone's guess and we're gonna be doing a whole lot more in the way of comparisons and editorial content on these two platforms and all the others going forward but in the meantime on this first day of actual public exposure to blackberry 10 it is very nice to see two contenders for the number three spot in smartphones that are so very different in very good ways lots more to come on blackberry 10 folks so visit us in the links of the description below i'm michael with PocketNow thanks for watching