The
BlackBerry 10 operating system -- widely seen as the
company-no-longer-known-as RIM's last chance to turn its sliding
fortunes around and keep itself in the top tier of smartphone
manufacturers.
The good news is that it's slick, easy to use, and looks
distinctly different from any of its rivals. The bad news is that
if you're not already a BlackBerry user, there may not be enough to
entice you to step across the floor and go BB. True, there are some
legitimate appeals for business, particularly relating to security,
but with some firms allegedly holding back on committing to BB just
in case the firm goes belly up mid-contract, there's clearly still
quite a bit of convincing and reassuring to do.
Swipe city
So what do you get? Well, based on the full touchscreen
Z10 (the Qwerty keyboard-packing
Q10 should be with us in the next few weeks), it's a ground-up
rebuild, stepping cleanly away from past incarnations to deliver
something very new. New is a relative term here though. It might
not look much like past BlackBerrys, but it clearly owes something
to iOS's neatly structured rows of icons,
rather than Android's jumble of shortcuts and widgets.
That's no bad thing in itself, but it's the swipe-based
interface that marks it out as something else. BB refers to the
system as "Flow", with the idea being that you flow between apps
and pages, without hard back or home buttons to disturb the
smoothness of the user experience.
You open the lock page by swiping up from the bottom of the
screen, and can then brush right to left to reveal several pages of
icons. When you want to come out of an app you slide up from the
bottom again, and the app shrinks to an "Active Frame" (it'll show
up to eight, four to a page) which you can then either close, or
keep running so they're handy for later.
At the bottom of the screen when you're not in an app are three
shortcuts, similar to the later Android layout, but this time it's
phone, search and camera. There are some nice animated effects as
one page of apps fades into the next as you scroll, which isn't
terribly practical, but it does help it to look like a
sophisticated, well thought out interface. Swiping down when you're
within an app often gives you access to more menus or additional
info. Counterintuitively, scrolling up when you're in the camera
app won't switch it off -- you'll simply take a picture. To exit
the camera you'll need to swipe from the left -- it's an unusual
lapse in consistency that betrays just how new this system is.
It's all quite a leap from standard smartphone behaviour, and
there's definitely a learning curve to get used to swiping in
general, as well as its various subtleties. For instance, swiping
only halfway up while you're in an app reduces the screen, and
gives you a "Peek" at any messages you have waiting. You can then
scroll right to instantly access your messages via the BlackBerry
Hub. When you're finished you simply swipe to the left to access
the app you were just in. Neat. Once you've got the hang of it, it
quickly starts to feel very natural, helped by the fact that it's
very smooth, with no sign of lag or jerkiness. We can expect to see
at least some of this functionality appropriated by BB's rivals in
the not too distant future.
BlackBerry Hub
Swiping left from the home screen takes you to the BlackBerry Hub,
from which you can check and update your emails, texts, BBMs and
social network. It's a neat solution that only requires you to
enter your various account details to keep you posted.
Messages can either be shown all together as a single timeline,
or you can view each of your different sources by pressing the Hub
button at bottom left. Pressing and holding a particular message
also brings up a menu of options from the right, including the
usual reply, forward and delete, but also, flag, file, invite to
meeting and search by sender or subject. Flick down from the top of
the message list and you'll also see today's calendar entries. It's
a very slick system overall, and well designed to save you extra
seconds throughout the working day.
Regular users will be pleased to note that despite a bit of a
facelift, BBM remains intact, though now BBM Video has been added
to BBM Voice to unify all types of communication. All free of
course if you're connected to Wi-Fi, though messages come off your
data allowance if you're not, which soon clocks up if you're using
video
Keyboard, browser and Balance
The keyboard has something new too, with its predictive text that
populates the keyboard as you type, with each word next to its
respective next letter. When you want to use one, you flick it up
to the typing pane and hey presto! Cleverly (and a little spookily)
it will also predict new words before you've started typing them,
based on what you've already written. Again, there's a learning
curve, but it's very intuitive once you've got used to it.
The browser is neat and easy to use, with slide-in menus
available to both left and right when you need them. It's very fast
too, and includes a Reader option, that pulls out the text from a
webpage and lays it out in clear, ad and banner-free ebook style
for easier perusal. Flash video capability is on board, even though
the format is on the way out and Adobe has said it won't be doing
any more upgrades -- but at least you shouldn't have any trouble
viewing sites that still use it.
Cascades is BlackBerry's new navigation feature, which helps you
to multitask without having to come out of the application you're
in. So if you're reading a message, you can pull it to the right to
check if any new messages have come in while you've been reading,
then release to flick back to where you were. In the calendar app
you can pull to the right to show a bit of yesterday, or to the
left to get a glimpse of tomorrow.
BlackBerry Balance is the feature that the company hopes will
endear it to business users. This in effect allows you to have two
phones in one, with your "home" details including calls, emails and
web details, kept completely separate from your corporate identity,
which takes its cue from your company's BlackBerry Enterprise
Server and only shows the apps and info that you need for work.
That's a very neat option too, but then if a company already has
mobile device management (MDM) software, the same can be done with
pretty much any type of smartphone -- and in these days of BYOD,
you still need to persuade the punters that a BlackBerry is the
device they really want to use.
Fewer apps
So far, for the most part, so good. But BlackBerry (don't call it
App)World is the company's Achilles heel. Apps have the power to
make or break the BlackBerry OS, and so far they've been a bit
underwhelming. There are currently a little over 70,000 apps on
there, which doesn't sound too bad, and it's certainly much more
than you're ever likely to use. But with Apple and Google each
offering ten times that number, it does seem a bit lacking.
So while there are many of the big boys available from
BlackBerry World, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Angry
Birds, but there are also a few high-profile omissions (so
far), such as Spotify, Pinterest, Temple Run and many
more. New additions are coming all the time, but there is the
danger that BB may be at the back of the queue for any essential
apps of tomorrow. The search options aren't quite as well developed
as its rivals either, with no option to show the best free or
paid-for apps separately.
Conclusion
Was it worth the wait? Yes -- just about. BB10 certainly offers a
system that's distinctly different (the swiping) with some of the
best elements of both iOS and Android. It's smooth and
sophisticated as well as being very practical and easy to use once
you get your head around the new way of doing things. It also has
some attractive out-of-the-box security options for corporate
users.
But whether it succeeds will be a bit of a chicken and egg
exercise -- if enough punters like it, the apps will follow, but if
it can't guarantee the level of flexibility and capability you get
from a well-stocked app store, it's likely to whither on the vine,
which would be a very great shame.
