Gadgetory

well hi this is dieter bohn for the verge and today rim is announcing a new version of its SDK for blackberry 10 this is beta 3 and it's also announcing a new device that's just for developers they're calling it the dev alpha B now what's interesting about the dev alpha B is that room says I needed to create it because they simply ran out of the original dev alpha that they gave out to developers but if you look closely at it you'll see that it's got this really strange boxy design with a very large bezel around the screen and we're pretty sure where that underneath this strange box is the first blackberry 10 device the l-series it matches the you know screen resolution that we're expecting 1280 by 768 it's got 16 gigs of storage and a gig of ram and it's a pretty safe bet that underneath is Boxxy exterior what you're actually looking at is something very close to what the first shipping blackberry 10 device will be just replace the ugly box with a Morse felt and pretty casing so the other big story today is the third beta of blackberry 10 of the SDK for developers and this gives us our first really good look at what the user her action models will be for blackberry 10 to start it up you just do swipe up from the bottom of the screen and this will actually unlock the device you don't have to hit a sleep wake button and as you swipe up the black sort of fades away and you can see what's going on underneath and you can also launch the camera for a launch screen to the default home screen are these four tiles you actually can have up to eight if you scroll and rim calls them active frames they're not widgets they're not live tiles their little miniature versions of the apps that you've run most recently they either show just a small version of the app or they can show a slightly different view when they're shrunken down at this size and so from anywhere in the OS you swipe up from the bottom and you can very quickly jump to your most recently used apps and if you're not using a ton of apps if you just use you know 6 or 8 apps for the most part you can move between them very very quickly to the right on the home screen is your standard list of icons and these are organized manually just like the iphone and just like the iphone you can take them drag them on top of each other to create folders another neat thing with the icons is you swipe down in a blank space it's a little bit weird once you do you'll be able to switch between personal mode and work mode and if you launch an app in work mode that lets you have apps that are secured by your company running alongside your own personal apps this is a feature that rim calls blackberry balance back to the home screen on the left is the biggest feature I think of blackberry 10 it's called the blackberry hub and this is a unified messaging app that you can get to from anywhere in the OS you simply swipe up and drag to the right and it sort of pulls out the messaging app and you can even peek a little bit to see your new messages once you're in there you've got a unified inbox for everything you've got all your email accounts and rim is also baking and support for bbm of course Twitter Facebook and LinkedIn and third-party developers will be able to put notifications in this area as well so this also serves as Notification Center but full integration for messaging apps from third-party developers will have to wait until later on overall blackberry dev 3 the beta here is really fluid really fast we're actually relatively impressed although we'll have to see what it's actually like to use full time and if both consumers and business users will take to it but so far the small bits that rim is shown us do have some promise but we'll have to see what happens when it ships hopefully in January or sometime in the first quarter of 2013