BlackBerry 10 OS

Email addicts, IT managers, and mad multitaskers will find much to love in BlackBerry 10, the new OS from the once-leading smartphone firm that drags the venerable BlackBerry line into 2013. BlackBerry 10 maintains some of the core themes that got so many users addicted to their "CrackBerries," while taking full advantage of the latest hardware and Web technologies.

The company now known simply as BlackBerry is aiming at a specific market: productivity-focused multitaskers. That leads to some positive breakthroughs, like a user interface that makes it really easy to flip through running apps. But BlackBerry 10 tends to lack many game and entertainment service apps that are available on other platforms, and it isn't as user-configurable as Android or Windows Phone. Were the smartphone market not dominated by two major players right now, I'd say that this sleek, flowing new OS would attract a lot of fans. But with iOS and Android owning 90 percent of the market, BlackBerry 10 has a heavy rock to push up a steep hill.

If you're curious about the first BB 10 phone, check out our review of the BlackBerry Z10. Also, the BlackBerry Q10, the first BlackBerry 10 phone with a hardware keyboard, is coming to all four national U.S. wireless carriers around May.

Basic Principles
The key idea in BlackBerry OS 10 is "flow." There's no back button; you're always moving forward. The BB10 experience pivots around a page of your eight most recently used, minimized apps called the Active Frame. Swipe left to go to the BlackBerry Hub,? or the universal inbox; swipe right to go to a very iPhone-like set of application panels. If you're doing something, and you want to do something else, you swipe up, minimizing your app, to return to the Active Frame where it's easy to jump into another app. At the bottom of every screen, there's a virtual Phone button, a Universal Search button, and a Camera button.

BlackBerry OS 10's home screen, to some extent, customizes itself: Those eight recently used apps can update their pages as new information comes in, potentially making them a little like Android's widgets or Windows Phone's Live Tiles. You can't move them around, though: They're just the most recent ones you've used. On the icon pages, you can move the icons around and form folders just like in iOS, but you can't add widgets or individual contacts as icons the way you can on Android and Windows Phone.

I've spent most of my time over the past few years with Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone. I find the inability to "arrange my furniture" on BlackBerry 10 frustrating: I always want to be able to see the weather at a glance and to be able to text my wife easily. This will be less of a problem for iOS users, who have never been able to truly customize their phones.

Apps can't pop up alert badges the way they do on Android and iOS; instead, they send messages to the Hub. While listening to CBC Radio 3, I found the CBC Music app periodically dropped a message in my Hub telling me which radio station I was listening to.

Keyboards and Input
As I've used a BlackBerry Z10 over the past few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that the OS's best feature is keyboards. Two of them, actually. BlackBerry says it has the best touch keyboard in the business, and it's right. In my experience, the BlackBerry Z10's touch keyboard design is considerably easier to type on, with fewer errors, than both iOS and Windows Phone keyboards. There are a lot of different Android keyboards and I doubt I've tried them all, but I'm secure in saying that BlackBerry's is in the upper echelon.

I'm even more excited about the BlackBerry Q10's upcoming physical keyboard. Few other than BlackBerry is doing high-end phones with physical keyboards, and the short time I've spent with the Q10's keyboard make me think it'll be the best of its kind. BlackBerry 10 will include the familiar BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts, too, letting you fly even faster across the UI.

There's one caveat: If you have large fingers, you may prefer a larger Android device such as the Samsung Galaxy Note II. You can only get keys up to a certain size on a 4.3-inch screen.

The Hub, Email, Calendar, and Contacts
Out of the box, you'll set up your accounts; BB10 works with most email services as well as BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Evernote (that last one is for integrating with the built-in notes app, called Remember). I have two Google Apps accounts, a personal one and a corporate one; the latter had to be set up as a Microsoft ActiveSync account to work correctly here.

The most "BlackBerry" thing about BB10 is the Hub, the unified inbox that has been at the heart of the BlackBerry experience for a decade. When you have a new message, a little red LED above the screen blinks, and you can jump to the Hub by swiping up and to the right in many apps. The gesture only works in portrait mode, though; if you swipe up on an app in landscape mode, it just minimizes.

The Hub stacks and combines all of your accounts (including Twitter mentions and Facebook messages) into a single stream, which can be a lot. You can easily sort by individual account or turn off particular streams, though. I'd actually suggest turning off Twitter, as you get way too many notifications and they often arrive late. The Hub supports folders, but not Gmail labels.

Instant messaging support is short; the Hub supports BBM and Facebook messaging, but not Google Talk or AIM.

BB10 supports HTML email messages as well as Microsoft Office and PDF attachments. If an email message is in plain text, it'll be properly formatted for the screen, but HTML tables tend to require a lot of horizontal scrolling.

In my tests, the OS was able to draw and merge contacts from my various email accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but image support was uneven: It grabbed some contacts' Facebook profile pics but not others. ?An Updates tab on each contact card shows their most recent social-networking updates, while a useful "activity" tab runs down your most recent correspondence. While you can attach three "speed dial" contacts to the dialer, there's no obvious way to pin a contact up for easy access the way you can on Android and Windows Phone. On a messaging-centric device, that's disappointing.

Calendar support is pretty solid. I loaded in Google, Facebook, and ActiveSync calendars. I could create events on the Google and ActiveSync calendars, but only invite participants on the Google Calendar, not on ActiveSync. And I couldn't see the participants' free/busy status. You can view by "working week," which is convenient, but you can't view multiple time zones, something I'd love to see in a business-centric OS.

BBM, BlackBerry's in-house social network and IM system, demands another paragraph here. BBM comes with every BlackBerry phone and reaches well beyond simple IM. On BlackBerry 10, it includes seamless VoIP and video chat?both of which worked very well over both LTE and Wi-Fi?and screen sharing, which lets you show a presentation remotely. These two features are great reasons for a company to standardize on BlackBerry 10, but as BBM is a BlackBerry-only feature, the BBM advantage fades when you're dealing with a group of friends who have a mix of iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerry devices. (Yes, I have the same problem with Apple's FaceTime.)

The Web Browser
The new BlackBerry Web browser is WebKit based and uses technology from Torch Mobile. In testing, it proved to be the equal of other leading browsers. BlackBerry is no longer behind on Web technologies.

The browser opens up to a scrolling, minimized set of your most recent eight Web pages. When you load a page, it opens up in the right view to avoid horizontal scrolling. You can have multiple tab and bookmarks, and add specific pages to your set of app icons. There's a "reader" mode that strips out ads and formatting from articles, and?whoa!?the browser supports Flash, smoothly, by default, without complaining. Hallelujah.

Other options include a private browsing mode, desktop view mode, and settable default search engine (it defaults to Bing, but you can change that). Google Maps works fine in the browser.

Performance is on par with other top browsers. I ran the Browsermark and Sunspider browser benchmarks, and got a 2,452 on Browsermark (which measures general browser performance) and 2198.4ms on Sunspider (which measures JavaScript performance). The Browsermark results were on par with dual-core Android 4.0 phones like the HTC One SV; the Sunspider results were slightly slower than competing Android phones, but not so much so that you'd notice.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/MDIEmudI9oQ/0,2817,2414752,00.asp

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