Z10 Adds a Little Zest to BlackBerry Lineup

Company rebranding aside, the new BlackBerry Z10, one of two new smartphones announced Wednesday by the former Research In Motion, has all the bells and whistles we've come to expect in high-end handsets, including a touchscreen. Will all those features -- and more apps than Windows Phone 8 had during its launch -- be enough to drag customers away from their iPhones and Androids?

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The handset maker previously known as RIM on Wednesday launched its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones: the Q10 with the familiar QWERTY keyboard, and something new for the company -- the touchscreen-based Z10.

BlackBerry, as the firm is now called, will release the Z10 in the United States in March with the Q10 following in April.

BlackBerry Z10

The company released full specifications of the Z10, but only had a placeholder Web page for the Q10 because "we'll be showcasing the Z10 and what it can do, and we'll release more information when we can," BlackBerry spokesperson Nick Manning told TechNewsWorld.
The Z10's Specs
The BlackBerry Z10 will have a touchscreen with gesture-based navigation, a virtual keyboard with contextual auto-correction, next-word prediction and a personalized learning engine that gets to know the way users type.
Its 4.2-inch screen has a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels, and a 15:9 aspect ratio.
The Z10 has a dual-core 1.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of flash memory. It also has a removable microSD memory card with up to 64 GB capacity; a USB 2.0 high-speed port for charging and data synchronization; and a micro HDMI port for connection to a projector or an HD TV set.

There's a 2 MP fixed-focus front camera with 3x digital zoom and image and video stabilization that can take videos at 720p. Features of the device's 8 MP autofocus rear camera include Back Side illumination for low-light performance; a 5-element F2.2 lens; a dedicated image signal processor; flash; image stabilization; 5x Enhanced Super Resolution digital zoom; and can record videos at 1080p.
The Z10 comes pre-loaded with various apps including BlackBerry apps; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; Foursquare; YouTube; BlackBerry Connect for Dropbox; Print To Go; and Adobe Reader.
Other features include password protection, screen lock and sleep mode, and BlackBerry Balance, which restricts business apps and data from being accessed by personal apps.
The Z10 supports WiFi and Bluetooth. It incorporates Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and has GPS, an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a proximity and ambient light sensors, and a gyroscope.

It's the Experience, Not the Tech

Most of the specs listed for the Z10 are standard in smartphones. Understanding why may be the key to comprehending BlackBerry's strategy.
"The most interesting thing about the announcement was that it wasn't about specs," Carl Howe, a research vice president at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.
"BlackBerry is selling an experience now. I think that shows a very mature marketing plan and a conscious desire to market the products as more than the sum of their parts."

The Apps (May) Have It

BlackBerry Q10

Apps are critical for any mobile device being marketed now, and the 70,000 apps offered on the BB10 platform "is the most number of apps that any new platform has launched with," Manning said.
"One of the things BlackBerry has done remarkably well is maintain the enthusiasm and interest of the developer community," Jeff Orr, a senior practice director at ABI Research, told TechNewsWorld. "There were more than 1 million app downloads on day one, and there's probably about 1,000 premier applications [that] include everything from Angry Birds Star Wars to a number of pretty hot titles, and they have things that are in development."
"BlackBerry 10 is launching with far more apps than Windows Phone 8 did when it launched," Yankee Group's Howe said. "I think it's probably enough to get started."

Making Headway in the Market

The challenge is whether BlackBerry can now make any headway in the smartphone market, where Android and iOS dominate.
Like Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry "is relevant in a space where the company has domain expertise but doesn't have the necessary channels and reach and audience," Orr pointed out. "The device, apps and platform are good, but their reach and their ability to maintain this vision are what the company have to prove."
If the company executes, said Howe, BlackBerry may become "a solid third ecosystem behind Apple and Android and ahead of Windows Phone 8."

Pollution Levels At Your Fingertips

Pollution is invisible and knowing how much is around you is not always easy. But a new system called Citisense, which consists of a mobile air quality sensor and smartphone app, could one day give people real-time information about the air around them.
"Asthmatics, who number in the millions, would find this valuable to their immediate health," said William Griswold, a computer science professor at UC San Diego, who lead the group that developed the system. "What we found is that people are very interested in their personal exposure, even if they are not asthmatic."
The system, which is still in the research stages, has a mobile sensor that a person wears while walking or biking around a city. The sensor detects the levels of pollutants in the air and sends the information to a server that uses machine learning to analyze the information for the app. Users with the app can see maps that display levels of pollutants, estimates of a user's exposure to those pollutants as well as a color-coded scale for air quality that uses EPA standards, i.e. green for good and purple for bad.

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The sensors were tested for four weeks by 30 people all over San Diego, most of them faculty at the university. According to the press release, one tester found that she was exposed the most to pollutants while she rode her bike to work.
Griswold said in the release that, “The people who are doing the most to reduce emissions, by biking or taking the bus, were the people who experienced the highest levels of exposure to pollutants.” The field tests also found that pollution levels varied throughout the day, depending on variables like traffic.
For the most part, the sensors are mobile and proximity to them is necessary for the app to receive data. However, Griswold said in an email to Discovery News that if enough sensors were put out into an area, personal sensors wouldn't be necessary to receive feedback on the pollutants nearby. "With the machine-learning component in the backend," he said, "it will be possible to get an estimate of your exposure from the machine learning estimates, even if you don't have a sensor."
Toward the end of the testing phase, a few fixed sensors were tested, but Griswold said that they didn't affect the user experience enough to continue.
One of the hurdles facing the project now is battery life. The data exchanges between the sensors and mobile devices takes up a lot of power. When testing, users had to carry around two chargers, one for the sensor and one for the smartphone. Currently, the team is experimenting with replacing constant updates by spacing out times when data is transferred to every 15 minutes to save battery life, or making it a transfer that occurs on demand.
Griswold said in an email that sensors like this will be start appearing on mobile phones in about a decade or so.

Unlock Your Door With ShareKey

 

The Android app communicates with smart locks on one’s door via NFC.

In the last year, I’ve locked myself out of my home no less than three times. Consequentially, that’s resulted in me having to shimmy through open windows like a burglar. I’m surprised my neighbors never called the cops on me.
If only I had ShareKey, a near field communication (NFC) app for a smartphone, I could have avoided all the breaking and entering.
Developed by Dr. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT), the Android app communicates with smartlocks on one’s door via NFC, which allows data to be exchanged wirelessly over a short range. To lock or unlock the door, simply wave the phone near the lock.
Unlike systems such as Lockitron and UniKey that use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to send instructions remotely, ShareKey requires that a phone be physically waved in front of their locks, making it more difficult for hackers to steal the signal.
Better yet, the system allows for any smartphone to be granted access to the doors for a specified amount of time, be it a few hours or a few weeks. House guests, dog walkers and plant waterers all know what a three-ring circus it can be swapping keys and getting them made, so this feature is an added bonus. ShareKey can send these “electronic keys” directly to the recipient’s smartphone as a QR code via email or a multimedia text message.
“For instance, I can grant the building superintendent access to my apartment
for a short period so that he can open the door for the gas meter to be
read while I’m at work,” explains Alexandra Dmitrienko from the SIT.
“The solution is built around modern security technologies and can be
easily integrated into existing access control systems.”
At this year’s CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, Germany,
researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information
Technology SIT in Darmstadt will demo ShareKey in an attempt to drum up interest in hopes that it will be on the market soon.

Apple Patents Smart Shoes

As “smart” technologies continue to consume just about every aspect of our lives — from eating and doing laundry to turning on the lights and saving ourselves from drunken blackouts — you’d think we’re incapable of functioning in world without a device negotiating our every move.

But as someone who’s prone to wearing a pair shoes or boots until they fall apart, perhaps I’m in need of more smart interventions than I think. It seems Apple may have a foot in the door for doing so, especially on the heels of their recent patent application for “smart shoes.”
Rather than being equipped with a external tracker, the shoes would contain wear-out sensors that would alert you via Wi-Fi when it was time to get some new kicks.
“As a shoe wears, physical support provided by the shoe decreases, thereby reducing associated protection from injury,” the patent states. “When a critical wear level is reached, even if the shoe looks like it is not particularly worn, the shoe may not provide adequate support and may, in fact, cause damage to feet.”
 
The sensor, which would connect to your iOS device, would exist either as a thin layer built in to the sole or be located in the heel.
“In one embodiment, a shoe wear out sensor includes at least one detector for sensing a physical metric that changes as a shoe wears out, a processor configured to process the physical metric, over time, to determine if the shoe is worn out, and an alarm for informing a user of the shoe when the sole is worn out,” states the patent.
Considering Apple’s savvy for design, I’d be interested to see what’s on the drawing board, if in fact these are stand-alone shoes. After all, this pair could use a little work.
 
Photo: A pair of vintage white sneakers that were part of Apple’s line of employee-exclusive clothing.