The word BlackBerry has always been synonymous with emails but somewhere
along the line (read with the introduction of the iPhone), the company
lost its way and found itself sidelined in the smartphone race,
currently being fought by iOS and Android.
BlackBerry 10 is likely the
company's final throw of the dice to regain relevance and offer a
viable alternative to iOS and Android. The OS has been designed afresh
from the ground-up and is built on the QNX platform that Blackberry
acquired. The UI has been refreshed as well, and the stock apps like BBM
now come with additional features. But does all this translate into a
great smartphone experience? Let's find out.
SetupWe
received our BlackBerry Z10 unit in powered off state and we have to say
we didn't really start off on the best of terms. The unit took over 2
minutes to show us the welcome screen - insert BlackBerry boot times
jokes here. Subsequent restarts were only slightly better.
The OS
goes through a series of welcome screens to setup the phone. Language,
Wi-Fi, Agreement, followed by the option to sign-in to your BlackBerry
ID, or sign-up if you don't have one. Next up is the screen to enable
Diagnostics/ Location data followed by Software Updates option. Finally,
you see a tutorial that guides you through the main gestures that
you'll need to navigate your way through the OS. You can swipe up to go
back to the task switcher/ home screen from anywhere, or swipe to the
left to reveal the BlackBerry Hub.
We then went on to setup BBM
and add Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Exchange, Outlook.com and Gmail
accounts. The whole process from first boot to this point took us around
25 minutes.
Every time you launch an app, the focus first
switches to the task switcher and then the app is launched. This gets
annoying very quickly. The task switcher is a giant grid of recently
used apps, that can also be used to kill apps manually. It is limited to
8 most-recently used apps.
Hub and PeekHub is the
centrepiece of the BlackBerry 10 experience, the place where all your
notifications sit. It also serves as your communication centre, so this
is where your email and BBM go. Think of it as a giant unified inbox.
Twitter
and Facebook notifications show up in the Hub as well, and clicking on
these, strangely, doesn't open the respective applications, but opens a
Twitter/ Facebook mobile interface that lets you choose an appropriate
response to the alert. Perhaps the idea is to let you do stuff without
ever leaving the Hub, but we really wish clicking on notifications took
us to the apps, like other platforms do (not that the apps themselves
are anything to write home about - see below).
There's no
standalone email client since, you guessed it, the Hub is there for all
your email needs. We configured an Exchange account, a Microsoft
Outlook.com account and a Gmail account, and the setup was pretty
straightforward with options to sync Calendar and Contacts in addition
to email.
The email experience was pretty good, and you don't
expect anything else from a BlackBerry. However, a few things, like
selecting multiple messages for example, take one click too many. There
seemed to be no way to do a select all messages either. We hope to see
this evolve as we go along.
Push email over IMAP accounts does not
seem to be supported either, not even for servers with IDLE support.
These accounts default to checking email every 15 minutes. We did like
the individual control over different email account settings, including
the ability to set a different signature for each account, especially
handy if you mix work and personal accounts (who doesn't). Are you
watching Apple?
The Hub also includes BBM which now includes the
useful video chat option (only over Wi-Fi), as well as screen sharing
support. A separate BBM icon is included on the home screen as well.
There's good news for users as they no longer require a special
BlackBerry plan to use BBM - it works fine over normal 2G or 3G data and
even Wi-Fi.
Peek
is BlackBerry's answer to the Notification Centre that feels nice in
the beginning, but ultimately leaves you wanting more. Swipe slightly
above from virtually anywhere to take a sneak peek at a bunch of icons
with numbers besides them, indicating the unread count. Icons with a red
star next to them indicate new content since you last took a peek.
This
feels handy at first but ultimately, without a preview of the email we
just got, or an indication of who just sent us the DM (or if we were
mentioned by someone), the novelty wears out pretty quick. Sure, Hub is
just a swipe away, but with all the accounts in there it can get a bit
overwhelming, and there's no way to quickly figure out the email that
just came in.
Overall, Peek, and especially Hub, are nicely done
and easy to get to, but we wish there was a Notification Centre we could
fall back upon if needed.
KeyboardFor a company that built
its reputation around its QWERTY devices, BlackBerry has been talking
up the BlackBerry 10 soft keyboard up quite a bit. Once you start using
the device, you realise why.
The BlackBerry 10 keyboard is a joy
to use thanks to the autocomplete options that pop up over the keyboard
as you type. Simply flick over the desired word gently and the OS types
it out for you followed by a space. The best part is that the OS learns
your typing habits as it goes along, so even words not native to your
language will show up eventually - 'Hinglish' users would really
appreciate this feature.
However, a slightly annoying problem is
that the autocomplete words appear all over the place and not at one
particular spot on the screen. This can take a bit of getting used to.
However, that's nit-picking over what is definitely the best stock
keyboard across all platforms. We expect to see a lot of people with
smiles on their faces as they gently 'flick away' on their BlackBerry 10
keyboards.
Text selection is another thing we couldn't get used
to. No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't accurately position
the cursor in order to copy paste text. Based on the feedback we've
received, we were not the only ones.
ContactsBlackBerry 10
pulled in our contacts from Outlook.com and Gmail accounts (we didn't
have any on Exchange), as well as displayed our Facebook friends and the
people we follow on Twitter. The OS was smart enough to figure out when
the same person was listed on multiple networks and 'linked' (merged)
the cards. The option to manually link cards in case the OS wasn't able
to establish the connection is especially handy, and another feature iOS
could learn from BlackBerry 10.
Installed appsBlackBerry
10 comes with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Dropbox and
Box.net pre-installed. Most clients are pretty barebones, and look like
wrappers to a mobile interface rather than full-fledged apps. Most users
will be satisfied with the experience, but if you're used to feature
rich clients on other platforms, you'll be in for a disappointment.
The
Clock app is nice, with a really intuitive way to set the alarm, and we
loved the Weather app as well. The Calendar app seems solid, similar to
stock apps on other platforms. DocsToGo offers basic Word, Excel,
PowerPoint viewing and editing.
BlackBerry WorldBlackBerry
claimed over 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps on launch day, and once you login
to the BlackBerry World (no longer called BlackBerry App World), you do
see a wide variety of apps listed. While most apps seem to be just
making up the numbers, you do find apps that work pretty well.
Gaming,
a category you don't usually associate with BlackBerry, is pretty well
represented, thanks mainly to the effort BlackBerry put in getting
third-party developers on-board. You'll find a lot of popular gaming
titles in BlackBerry World, including the latest edition of everyone's
favourite game, Angry Birds Star Wars.
App discovery is a problem,
especially with lot of apps just making up the numbers as mentioned
earlier, but we expect that to get slightly easier as more users from
more markets start using BlackBerry World, and the best apps start
rising to the top.
Some of the notable third-party apps missing as
of date include Skype, Google Maps, Gmail (if you prefer a dedicated
app), SkyDrive, Instagram and Flickr. We also faced the problem of
corrupt downloads a couple of times, but re-downloading the apps fixed
the problem.
By the time you read this, BlackBerry World in India
would have added Music, Movies and TV Shows, but these weren't live in
time for this review. We'll update this story with our thoughts in due
course.
MapsUnfortunately the Maps app is nothing to write
home about, especially in India. If you've come to rely upon your
smartphone for finding your way around, BlackBerry 10 isn't ready for
you yet. We hope this gets fixed at the earliest, since Maps are a
critical part of the picture, as Apple found out first hand not so long
ago. However, BlackBerry claims that the latest version of MapMyIndia
maps for BlackBerry will be available free of cost to all customers.
This should come as a big relief.
BrowserThe BlackBerry 10 browser is updated with a
WebKit-based engine and HTML5 support. It does a decent job rendering
websites and, on the BlackBerry Z10, felt pretty snappy. The browser
comes with Flash disabled, with a prompt to turn it on when you visit a
website with Flash elements for the first time.
MiscellaneousMost
apps feature a Share hub, that provides a standard sharing framework to
most common sources like Twitter, Email etc. even to third-party apps.
BlackBerry
has also improved the desktop software quite a bit, especially on the
Mac. You have the option to sync content with your iTunes/ iPhoto
libraries. The device simply mounts as a storage device you can access
in Finder/ Explorer, even over Wi-Fi.
The Settings app is pretty much you would expect. We especially liked the reveal password option under email settings.
BlackBerry Protect is now built-in to the OS and lets you locate and remotely wipe your device in case it gets lost.
VerdictBlackBerry
10 OS is clearly a 1.0 release. There are plenty of rough edges, and
the app ecosystem isn't mature, with quite a few notable third-party
absentees. However, beyond all this we can see a platform that has tried
to provide a different user experience, and has, by and large,
delivered. While there are a few things one can't overlook - like Maps -
we think BlackBerry has done enough things right to provide a viable
3rd alternative. In that respect, BlackBerry 10 competes with Windows
Phone 8, and in our opinion, the OS already looks a more promising
option that its more established rival.
BlackBerry Z10: In pictures
