Gadgetory

hey this is Josh with the birch and we were taking a look at the BlackBerry z10 the first-ever BlackBerry 10 device the phone might look a little bit familiar because it shares a lot with the iPhone 5 in terms of design language though the z10 is a bit larger it's got a 4.2 inch display it feels good in your hand the back is made from a soft touch kind of rubbery dimpled material which is really nice to hold as I said it's got a 4.2 inch display and the resolution is 1280 by 768 and it looks quite nice inside there's a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core processor 2 gigs of ram and 16 gigabytes of on-board storage though that is expandable through the use of a micro SD card the z10 has Wi-Fi GPS and all of the other sensors that you would expect in a modern smartphone it also has two cameras an 8 megapixel shooter on the back and a 2 megapixel camera on the front of the device the cameras on the phone are decent but the software is interesting RIM is touting a function called time shift which allows you to snap a picture kind of in burst mode and then select through the different frames of the photo that was taken to find the perfect moment overall the phone is nicely designed and I liked using it I was a little disappointed with the battery life however there were a few days during testing when I took it off the charger around 9 a.m. and ended up with a dead phone at about 6 or 7 p.m. but the story here is not really about the z10 it's about BlackBerry 10 the new operating system from RIM it has nothing to do with blackberry 7 or any previous versions though there are some similar design traits exhibited the basic concept of the BlackBerry 10 interface is that there are really four states you can be in there's in an application that's pretty straightforward on your home screen which does double duty as your multitasker in your app drawer where you can open up an app just like on any other device or in blackberry hub which encompasses all of your messages that you get on the phone and that could be email MMS SMS Twitter Facebook etc you get into those various states with a couple of gestures the main gesture on the phone is swipe up from the bottom of the display which unlocks it and takes you to your home screen if you're inside an app you can swipe up you'll go out to your home screen the other main gesture that you use is kind of a continuation of the home screen gesture you swipe up and then continue holding and swipe to the right which gives you a view of what notifications have come in and eventually if you swipe all the way over you get into your unified inbox your home screen is limited only to 8 items and those items can only be arranged by what you've most recently opened so if you've got twitter open and that's your 9th app and you open another one twitter is gone and you've got to reopen it the second problem with the concept is that some of those apps turn into widgets when you minimize them which is great for instance the weather widget works really well and updates in the background right on the home screen the problem is you can't keep the weather widget on the home screen so you have to keep reopening the app every eight applications you open but the bigger issue with the OS is the way it handles notifications so instead of having a notification bar like Android or iOS you're actually just looking at the very message that you were notified about the biggest problem notifications is that when you go into your hub and you check a message it saves that state which means that when you get another notification and you go to check that notification you actually end up in the notification you were checking before that what happens is you've got to start backtracking into your hub to figure out where that message actually is located but in terms of general speed and capability I would put BlackBerry 10 on par with Android or iOS it doesn't seem to be lacking any or many of the features that those operating systems have it's got a different idea about how you should navigate it but the question is whether or not it's a better idea and in my opinion it's not on the app front rim is done a pretty good job with its first party offerings the browser is very good and certainly as capable as any other modern mobile browser that's out there the email experience which rim of course has been known for historically is good even with my gmail accounts but I would not say great multiple message management proved to be a little bit tricky in particular you have to long press on a message then select another item from a popover menu and then start selecting your messages and then tap on the trash to get rid of those messages seems like there could be a much quicker way to get at multiple message management one of the great things that rim is done is integrate a lot of third-party services into its core apps they've got an app here which is a note-taking a reminder app called remember that integrates Evernote so you can sync your account and folders right into that application there's also a surprisingly clever app called story maker which allows you to combine video clips with music and a variety of effects and titles I thought it was pretty fun to play around with and was impressed that the typography and the effects used in the application itself the device comes pre-installed with a Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and Foursquare app in my case however I thought the way it handles Twitter was a little bit clunky much like Windows Phone it will show you a list of your latest at messages on Twitter but in order to fully read those messages you have to click into each one individually and speaking of the Twitter app it's actually kind of bad in the version that I tested it looks and feels very much like Android or iOS Twitter except that it doesn't auto update in the background and when you pull to refresh it takes you from wherever you were the last time you check the app to the top of your timeline RIM has improved bbm for blackberry 10 adding some really interesting functions like bbm video calls which worked well most of the time when I was testing the device and a novel function which allows you to share the screen of your phone with somebody else over bbm video rim claims that BlackBerry 10 will launch with about 70,000 third-party apps in its BlackBerry World app store and that may be true but it kind of feels like 69 thousand of those apps are bad a lot of them are rehashed playbook titles and some of the ones that I tested which are made for blackberry 10 just didn't really seem up to snuff it is clear however that making great apps for blackberry 10 is possible the USA Today app for instance is very good as our handful of the games Angry Birds Star Wars for instance plays as good if not better than it does on other platforms and rim says there's a lot more coming including some fairly significant app contributions from EA games as well as Gameloft rim is added a content marketplace to black bear world so you can now buy music TV or movies pretty easily through the same interface that you get your apps in one spot that I think rim has executed fairly poorly in is the inclusion of Android apps in blackberry world the device is capable of running Android apps in a runtime environment which is essentially like software emulation of Android and the apps definitely run like they're being emulated they don't really run that well and as soon as you're inside an Android app you're literally inside an android environment and just reminder this isn't this year's Android or last year's Android this is Android 2.3 it's not really in addition to the OS and in some ways kind of detract from what RIM is doing with blackberry 10 the z10 is going to be available for $199 on contract overall the z10 is a fine device it's even a very good device and BlackBerry 10 is a very good mobile operating system I think it's extremely capable and I'm excited about what it's going to develop into the bottom line is that it's a good phone but it's lacking a killer app or killer piece of functionality that's going to sway most buyers from Android iOS or Windows Phone