Gadgetory

what's up everyone John render from TechnoBuffalo here at the full review for you of the BlackBerry z10 is this guy the Savior that BlackBerry's hoping abusing the device for the better part of two weeks really get to know a new operating system I didn't feel it just a few days is gonna give it a fair shot give me a chance get to know all the nuances and turn the little quirks of using a brand new platform so let's go ahead put it through its paces see if this should be the phone that you keep for the next two years alright so here is the BlackBerry z10 I'm gonna break this review into a few parts I'm gonna talk about the pros I'm talking about the cons and I'm gonna give it a final score so let's go ahead and start with the specs to remind you what this guy packs because it's an all-new phone from an all-new company I can play a game at home and count the amount of times I say rim instead of blackberry so the screen here is a pretty nice 4.2 inch screen the resolution of 1280 by 768 which gives it a 355 PPI being powered by a 1.5 gigahertz TI OMAP 44 70 that's a Snapdragon chip it's got 2 gigs of RAM 16 gigs of internal storage expandable with microSD 8 megapixel shooter living right there on the back and a 2 megapixel one living on the opposite side on the front Wi-Fi a total Evan BG and then bluetooth 4.0 NFC battery is a very oddly shaped 1800 milliamp hour it's got all the usual sensors you'd expect accelerometer gyroscope Magna meter and proximity alright so first let's start with call quality and I should say this is an unlocked unit not released by a carrier on use with AT&T LTE network Kokoro is actually very good about on par with any other iOS or Android phone I've tested signal strength is actually very good as well especially impressive considering it's an unlocked phone that has not been tuned for the carrier's Network alright so let's talk about the pros of blackberry 10 this is a review that I think you get only from using a phone for two weeks not sort of rushing to get something up after a few days alright so let's talk about build quality build clutter is actually really impressive here on the z10 despite its plastic bag Ashley it's one of the best are removable back phone that I've seen really don't feel sort of any sort of flimsy plastic like you do on some other phones and I'd say that the build quality actually rivals HTC H I think as some of the best in the industry you almost don't even realize it this is a removable back so hats off to blackberry for that there's a lot to really like about this operating system the first is the home swipe I will say this took a lot of getting used to so whenever you're in an application or doing something and you want to get home instead of having a physical home button you actually just swipe on up that one took probably about six days actually become second nature I found myself looking for home but looking for home but you almost have to relearn everything you thought about with phones but I really do like it blackberry peak is really cool too essentially you can do is you can swipe up you can see failure notifications right there on the left you can peek on in to see what you've got in your mailbox it's a pretty neat little trick and while I'm here blackberry hub is a unifying inbox for all BlackBerry devices and it works really well emails come in just extremely fast the operating system is very very fluid as well I found with previous BlackBerry OS it sounds to be a little bit laggy not so at all to dual-core processor 2 gigs ram this thing absolutely flies not sure is really doing anything whether you're opening applications or playing games it's extremely fast a blackberry spent a lot of time attention to detail here and you see it on a lot of little things for example when you're unlocking the phone swiping up you almost get sort of a cool shadow effect just little things that I really appreciated here as well I also like the core applications blackberry world for example looks really nice looks like a modern apps are both something that was sort of tacked on to an outdated operating system the other applications that you use probably most often Twitter Foursquare Facebook and LinkedIn I'll look almost identical to their iOS and Android counterparts and behave just the same to refresh you just pull on down so very simple there one of the features that I really liked as well and I talked about this in a separate video is in the camera so the camera button you can open up either via a shortcut on the home screen or is a dedicated sort of soft hard button daniyar channels and oxymoron but they're always down there and on the home screen is the time shift feature it's really cool and despite being in an Android phone it's really awesome and kind of neat party trick people ask what I think about the z10 it's often the first thing that I show them so one of things BlackBerry is really touting here is a super-awesome is their new keyboard so let me go and show you what that looks like so first the location of the frets and those are those gray lines actually really well placed on the keyboard learns very quickly what's not being talked about surprising with the z10 it's actually underneath the screen there's a heat sensor so it can learn where your fingers hit so if you always kind of hit the opie and they may take the P key it'll learn that and I'll sort of move that contact point over a little bit and it works very well and it learns very quickly what you're typing I wasn't overly a creative first but the more I use the phone the better it got so again if you just type this corrects it for you is a I notice that words start appearing down here and some of the cool things you can do is you can swipe that right up and you can see that there's tends to start to be completed so it's actually very little typing it's not like a swipe keyboard we can sort of drag your finger all around I actually to see the words and swipe it up to the screen speaking of swiping BlackBerry's not using a gorilla glass screen here and I'm not sure what the screen is made of but oftentimes if your fingers are a little bit dry for example I don't swipe on the screen as often other phone just a little bit of an odd quirk overall this is probably the best keyboard that I've ever used on an all touchscreen phone I've used a lot of keyboards on all touchscreen phones and if you want to hide the keyboard in any application should go ahead and hold down the space button and it will go ahead and get rid of it and to go back to home as I mentioned you just go ahead and swipe up the next thing that BlackBerry does right not surprising is email they do this right they've always done this right and it's no surprise here that it works absolutely awesome on the z10 emails come in quicker on my phone than they do on my desktop it is absolutely incredibly fast if you aren't using a blackberry Exchange server no special BlackBerry data plan is needed here anymore there's been some conflicting reports but I'm using the same data plan I use an iOS or Android without any problems I've got the little blackberry notification up there to let me know that things are working the browser we've got a modern browser here finally and so it brings a bit of a surprise flash is enabled on the device you can go ahead and turn it on or turn it off depending on websites you are using and it works just like flash used to on Android phones the other cool thing we've got here is multitasking you can see that's sort of in these panes and it shows you what's open so I'm sort of just being a shrunken down version the app actually shows you useful information so for example here on phone calls I can see what my recent calls are and it shows you sort of important information as you go through so you can see it here with blackberry world and the application has something important to show you it'll show it right there it's kind of neat I do miss though on old qnx devices and I'm looking at you playbook to close application you could swipe them off the screen you got to hit a little X down there I have to be a little bit on the annoying side multitasking it works very well I thought it'd be annoyed that I could see only four panels here actually became pretty second danger just to scroll down and hop on over to next one there's been some reports about battery life being absolutely awful it's making hundred million power battery and it's not all that big but it has worked very well I'm a pretty hard user on my phone with a few hours phone calls lots of browsing facebooking Twitter picture uploads and stuff I'm very easily able to get through a full day and that's with two emails coming in and everything so I wouldn't worry all that much about battery life despite being a very small 1800 milliamp hour battery other things I like I love the visual voicemail is built-in some of the applications that I use a lot are missing like whatsapp and google max firm apps for example but you can actually side load Android app so I can get into too big a detailed how to do that there'll be a link down below and from watching this video on TechnoBuffalo it'll be embedded I had a side load certain Android apps on the screen other niceties here are with bbm video chat works very well on par with anything I've seen on Android or iOS and screen sharing works as advertised it's really novel feature I haven't found many uses for but it does work in pictures and video you can show pretty much everything it's very neat blackberry really has grown on me actually I used to be a dedicated blackberry user before 2007 when the iPhone hit and I switch back and forth between Android and Windows Phone there's a lot to like here with the BlackBerry z10 and BlackBerry 10 you can tell they spent a lot of time holding this because they had to but all is not perfect let me go and talk about some of the cons so I started this video by talking about the build quality I'm gonna go back to the build here the chins sort of what I've affectionately called them on the top and bottom of the phone are much larger than you see on any other phones I'm sure it's where the antennas are located but almost feels like I've got a big plasticy case on the phone I would have loved to see those smaller you've got plenty of bezel here where the BlackBerry logo is to sort of start your swipe up or your swipe down motions on the top so I'm not sure why that chin is there I would have liked to see even a little bit thicker I'd have that chin removed there are a lot of OS quirks here as well as it expect from a brand new operating system for example for the first week I used the phone I couldn't add a new calendar event it would constantly crash I mean then just suddenly fixed itself something to sort of keep in mind the camera while the time shift feature is kind of neat took really uninspiring unimpressive figures I would have expected more from the sensor the app selection here I talked about blackberry app world looking great the app selection here is not so good now they promised the ton of them are going to be coming but for right now they're not here that's a big question mark our developers going to not only port their apps are they going to support the applications in the future so certainly that is yet to be seen at the app selection they're definitely something to consider if looking to pick up the phone because right now they are not there perhaps by time these phones at US carriers next month or later the application support will be a little bit better something else the BlackBerry is added here is voice controls you can access it by either hitting the voice control button or the middle button right there on the right and sort of a Syrian Google search s functionality and it is not overly good it does some stuff and I'll show you here what it does so you can send a text email BB a message call a contact search internet or schedule an appointment or take notes so I'll go ahead and do a quick search here show me reviews of the BlackBerry z10 searching the internet for show me reviews of the BlackBerry intent so you can see it's not the most elegant of voices not the most elegant of searching it is functional and it will send text and such but when you compare it to what you get with Siri and Google search it just doesn't compare one of the other odd quirks I found is when you make a phone call like that to the Bluetooth so if you are in your car and your phone is locked and sitting next to you and you make a call the screen is going to light up and unlock when you end a call it is going to stay lit up and not go back to a lock say every other phone I've pretty much ever tested has locked and turned off the screen so if you're not aware of it the phones in your pocket you're going to burn out your battery very quickly the screen is going to stay on until your timeout limit is sets there we've got that set for it's sort of a very audit quirk with the OS and certainly something I'd expect to be fixed very very soon another thing that's quite disappointing here is Maps it is awful the points of interest don't work very well and the whole Maps itself is just not overly elegant so bear that in mind if you're looking to pick up a z10 turn-by-turn those actually very good so sort of very similar what we saw with Apple maps the good news though if you follow some easy steps you can definitely get Google Maps up on your phone everything that comes with Google Maps which should make your life a little bit easier I'm speaking of applications I miss Instagram I use it quite a bit on any other device Instagram is not here and BlackBerry has not really said when it's going to be coming or even if it's going to be coming so there are a lot of pros and a lot of cons on with the BlackBerry z10 there is much more that I could have talked about I wanted to give you guys sort of the highlights of each so what's the final score of the BlackBerry z10 it gets a very solid eight it's a well built of life the really elegant operating system the big question here though is is it better than anything else that's out there when you're trying to catch the competition you can't just run as fast as them you got to run faster to make sure you can eventually catch up and I'm not sure the BlackBerry is running fast or are they running at the same pace as iOS and Android that's debatable but I would say they probably are but to catch up in that huge market sure they've lost over the years I'm just not sure the BlackBerry 10 is there yet perhaps we get some more choices when the q10 is out on other screen sizes are released they may have that value ad but those you that use a lot of applications you want to play a lot of games it's going to be tough to recommend it to q10 if email is your thing and you want a great keyboard this has always been BlackBerry's bread and butter this is going to be a great phone to pick up it doesn't do anything poorly by any stretch the imagination I'm just not sure it does anything better than the competition so take that advice for what you will but it is a very solid phone I'm going to continue this my daily driver for another few weeks I'd love to hear what you guys think of the BlackBerry z10 you get to pick it up when it comes to your carrier are you excited not excited do you think that BlackBerry is going to have a future I want to hear what you have to say leave your comments down below and of course go to TechnoBuffalo com to get the full written review if watching this on YouTube the link will be right down below for now I'm John renter from TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you guys in the next video you