Gadgetory

we unboxed it and we gave you a quick software tour now that we're away from the excitement and the noise of the exhibition hall it's time for some quiet time I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is blackberry z10 first impressions okay so this is our BlackBerry z10 review unit provided to us by research emotion just we've given you a look at the hardware on our unboxing video but just to elaborate a little bit on that and how it feels in the hand before we pair on the screen it is definitely a unique device I really like the look here I think the white one really looks amazing but even the black one has a quiet sort of distinguished dignity to it and as I mentioned on the unboxing video this looks like a kind of a rigid textured back but it's not it's actually soft touch and then gives you a good amount of grip as you can see the screen is no stranger to fingerprints here but it doesn't mean it feels bad under the thumb it feels in some ways a lot like many other portrait smartphones the 4.2 inch display is certainly smaller than we're used to seeing from flagships but to be honest it's quite refreshing to be able to get to the entire display with with one thumb but in some other ways it certainly stands out nicely these are you know very sharp angles on the front here but they don't hurt at all they just add to the aesthetic kind of a brutally simplistic aesthetic but it works for this device on the first impressions basis powering it on we can see that the power standby key is mounted up top but once again because of the size of the device that's not a problem as it is on say the HTC Droid DNA when your fingers way up here this is actually not too bad because your finger is sort of already there anyway we're confronted with the lockscreen this is a Super AMOLED panel we are informed having a little bit of trouble loading the BlackBerry specs page at BlackBerry's website right now wonder why as you can see we've already got this synced up with some of our accounts and we're getting an indication here that we have some notifications in Twitter email Facebook and a notification and one of our calendar events has already populated the lock screen so that's nice and the lock turn you can't unlock this from just anywhere you have to see this is actually happening none of this is actually having any bearing on the phone you notice you get a little prompt there the BlackBerry 10 OS is very nice at prompting you when you're getting something wrong as you can see but and you can see the the UI peeking from underneath the lock screen as I slide up to unlock but also as was demoed in the software demonstration you can tap and hold on the camera con to jump right into that might be a little bit frustrating to have to tap and hold for a quick launch feature like a camera we would prefer a hardware key but that's the case on a lot of phones at least we do have a jump right into the camera there another interesting software point is while the application launcher looks an awful lot like those you'll find on Android and iOS hopping on to the home screen does not you've got cards showing your active applications which can be dismissed with a tap of an X but also despite these soft keys these are that we have dialer search and camera down here for the soft keys and those are not omnipresent if you jump into an app those disappear and there is no home button down here it's just the BlackBerry logo and the microphone that are gonna greet you down low so what you have to do to get back to the home screen is a swipe up from the bezel that Blackberry already took the initiative to incorporate that into its PlayBook so that will be familiar to users of the PlayBook but it is something that new users are going to have to get used to and that brings us in to the other gesture that that swipe up from the bottom bezel requires which is the peak if you swipe up from here you can see this is just a peak of your current notifications there as we saw on the home screen you can do that from within any app so let's just hop into an app here let's say we want to hop into weather not sure about our data connection here yeah it's gonna see we haven't set that up yet but if you go ahead and swipe up you can just peek see if any of those notifications are crucial if they're not you can go back into the app if they are you just continue that motion slide your thumb over to the right and there we haven't now I haven't agreed a couple of accounts already as I mentioned this is my Twitter feed integrated with my email some other Twitter I think these are direct messages or these might be mentions I looked at already recent phone call more Twitter and of course if I if I were more active on Facebook today we'd see more of that but that's very interesting to get out of that once again just swipe up from the bottom and it's not just the bottom bezel getting all the fun you can of course swipe down from the top as well for some familiar settings we see something like this on Android jelly bean but there's a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi toggles you can jump right into the settings notification selector rotation lock which we're always very happy to see if we do jump into settings we can look at all the stuff that we have to explore because we are going to be checking that out in detail in a future video but there are also handy gesture tutorials which let you know how exactly to operate the OS and one of the nice things about the bottom gesture which the gesture tutorial just reminded me of is when the device is locked you don't have to rely on this clunky button up top it's one of my favorite things about the PlayBook that nobody ever talked about after it was released you can just swipe up from the bottom and there's your lockscreen right there there is no there's not a necessity for this clunky button action you just slide up from the bottom when the device is asleep that is very very very handy speaking of features we remember from webOS we do have this handy search functionality down here which approximates the just type functionality if we go ahead and type pocket no no even after just the barest of syncs we get contacts all my contacts from pocket now we get messages containing the word pocket now and then if we want to extend the search down here we can do so via any means we desire they can just tap Google it will open up a browser session for us and hopefully a load a page yes searching for pocket no and there it is well very quick response on the browser there that's very nice gonna just hop on back to the card view so that's one of the things we are not big fans of you really have to give it a good determined to swipe to get back into card view just as some often a simple flick does not do the job you really have to deliberately come back here to go back to the home screen so there is that and then we also saw our typing experience now it's going to take us a while to properly formulate an opinion here but just so you get an impression this is not a bad typing experience at all that's what I've tried to say and we got most of that right as you can see the word experience and then entirely correct there okay long tap highlights the word and we can just do that and then what if we want to just haha you tap on and then you get to these context-sensitive cut copy paste shortcuts that's very nice let's go ahead and cut it and then we're automatically dropped into the magnifying glass and we will go ahead and try and type the word experience out of the box it looks like that suggestion functionality is not enabled we're going to go into settings and play with that also out of the box there's a very quiet keyboard as far as the acoustic responsiveness goes and there is no haptic feedback don't really like that too much but one of the good things is that when you're in a password field you can do get a persistent number row across the top kind of which that was consistent across all implementations of the keyboard but you can just tap into it there also people who port from the iPhone to the new BlackBerry OS will be very at home but people who pour it in from say Windows Phone or Android will be frustrated that no matter what your shift state is the keyboard stays in all-caps configuration we'll have some more in-depth thoughts on the keyboard when we've had time to play with it and actually we'll have more in depth thoughts on the entire device when we've had more of a chance to play with it this is just quick first impressions on my first hour with the BlackBerry z10 running the new BlackBerry 10 OS we're gonna have a whole lot more coming up follow us on the links down in the description below and stay tuned for more videos they are coming up today tomorrow and for a few days as we explore this brand new platform from blackberry you