BLACKBERRY Z10
BlackBerry Z10 official images
BlackBerry's previous generation of touch-driven smartphones felt a
lot like Nokia's early attempts to knock Symbian 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. If you think dual-core Krait is old news on Android, you'd be
right, but the Z10 is closer to the iPhone in this regard - the OS 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" WXGA screen - slightly
bigger and sharper than the iPhone 5's retina display - but kept the
package more compact than certain massive droids. Then came all the
connectivity features, hardware ports and slots.
Here's what they ended up with, the good and the bad of it:
Key features
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri/quad-band UMTS/HSPA, optional 100 Mbps LTE
- 4.2" 16M-color WXGA (768 x 1280 pixels) capacitive touchscreen TFT
- Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait, 2GB RAM, Adreno 225
- BlackBerry 10 OS; advanced on-screen keyboard; Office document editor
- BlackBerry Hub with extensive social networking connectivity
- BBM with video chat and screen sharing
- 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with face detection and Time Shift; LED flash, 2MP front facing camera
- Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps; 720p recording with front-facing camera
- 16GB storage, microSD card slot; built-in Dropbox and Box integration
- Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot; Wi-Fi sync
- Bluetooth 4.0
- NFC
- standard microUSB port, microHDMI
- 3.5mm audio jack
- GPS receiver with A-GPS
Main disadvantages
- Brand new UI has a steep learning curve
- Occasional crashes and unstable behavior
- BlackBerry World missing key apps
- BlackBerry Maps are even worse than Apple Maps
- Camera offers little control over image quality
As with any newborn platform, there will be growing pains - sparse
app market and iffy 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).
