The BlackBerry Z10 marks the rebirth of a fallen leader in the smartphone market. It’s a clean break from the past with a big touch screen, but the same business mentality that made it the favorite of office dwellers around the world. Except, this time BlackBerry has also added a dash of fun. BlackBerry’s previous generation of touch-driven smartphones felt a lot like Nokia’s early attempts to knock into shape for touchscreen. With the Z10, however, the company threw everything out and started fresh.
BlackBerry 10 that powers the phone is a modern operating system with a brand new gesture-based interface and support for powerful dual-core CPUs, Z10 is closer to the iPhone in this regard it has been optimized to run on very few devices (just one right now, one more on the way), allowing for maximum efficiency. Then BlackBerry equipped the Z10 with a 4.2″ screen slightly bigger and sharper than the iPhone 5’s retina display but kept the package more compact. Then came all the connectivity features, hardware ports and slots.
As with any newborn platform, there will be growing pains, sparse app market and maps for one. The biggest concern is whether the sleek new interface will put people off (both current and new BB users). It’s fast and intuitive once you get used to it, but doesn’t have the level of familiarity of the iOS or Android (which honestly took years cultivating). That’s the mission ahead of the BlackBerry Z10. It can’t single-handedly recapture the market and bring BlackBerry to its former RIM glory, instead it sets the stage for future devices (the Q10 is a couple of months away).
That’s not to say that the Z10 won’t achieve popularity with quality hardware and software, the Z10 can easily net both people who need a BlackBerry but are tired of the aging BB OS 7 devices and new users who are equally tired of iOS and Android. So, revolution or evolution? The hardware is miles ahead of Berries of old.
BlackBerries were the phone of choice for business users and they have to deal with tons of messages so the interface has to be very efficient. And the BlackBerry Z10 saddled with the new Hub is as efficient as they come. Perhaps only Windows Phone is close when it comes to unified messaging. The Hub is pretty simple at first glance a list of messages with an icon that indicates the service (SMS, BBM, email, Twitter or Facebook, but also calls and voicemails) and also flags messages read or unread (color icons are for unread messages, monochrome icons are for read messages). Messages are indexed by date.
Blackberry Z10 will be available soon in the US and also worldwide, to all the blackberry fans, this is a must get device since you will not need blackberry service to use its internet!
