By: iPadfanzz staff on February 7, 2013
India’s fast growing wireless market is a major draw for all the major mobile handsetmarkers with an estimation that India’s enterprise mobile workforce will grow 53 per cent over the next four years to reach 205 million by 2015 of which as many as 65 per cent will be equipped with smart mobile devices. Surely, the struggling phone maker BlackBerry, don’t want to be left out in such a situation. Recently the company unveiled its new smartphone operating system, BlackBerry 10, and a pair of new handsets -- the BlackBerry Z10 (all-touch) and BlackBerry Q10 (touch with physical keyboard) – in a market already dominated by smarter devices from Apple and Android.
The company’s Z10 smartphone, which according to some reports is already available in the UK and Canadian markets, will soon be launched in India and Indonesia by February 24 at a price tag of Rs 39,000. And reports suggest early signs of strong demand for its new Z10 smartphone. The Z10 will launch in the US soon, after carriers complete their famously-long testing cycles. The US has always been a strong market for BlackBerry,
The new Z10 offers a good design, an interesting interface and great built-in photo and video editing features, making it match high-flyers such as the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3.
The Z10 has an impressive 4.2 inch of screen on the diagonal, which packs in 768x1,280 pixels. Hence, everything on this display looks extremely sharp, including your photos or high-res videos.
On the design part, there’s nothing unconventional as there’s a blocky black rectangle, a lock button on the top and volume keys on the side. A simple yet efficient design.
The phone weighs 137.5 g, and it's only 9 mm thin, a tad higher than the iPhone 5. It is one of the best Blackberry phones the company has ever produced. In size, the Z10 has dimensions of 5.1 x 2.6 x .35 in. The Z10 comes with a 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. The processing capacity of Z10 is fast as it has the 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4. The Z10 offers NFC for file sharing and mobile payments, something the Galaxy S III also includes (but not the iPhone 5).
The Z10 has 16GB storage and a microSD slot that can handle memory cards up to 32GB. In summary, the Z10's hardware features show it to be very close or superior to leading smartphones on the market.
The Z10 comes with an all new BlackBerry 10 software that uses a full range of gestures to access its comprehensive range of features. There’s no home button on the BlackBerry 10, and clear homescreen that gives a 'default' view. Instead you move through the apps and the screens with swipe gestures.
Although to a naïve user it may take some time to learn the BlackBerry 10, experienced users will find the Z10 intuitive and easy to use. For instance, you swipe down from the top bezel to access application settings and swipe up from the bottom bezel to minimize an opened app. You wake up the Z10 from standby by swiping up from the bottom bezel to go to the home screen.
You can find the complete list of apps on the phone by scrolling to the right, where apps are ordered in a 4x4 grid, much like Android's app list.
The browser on BlackBerry 10 is fast and zooming in on a Web page is slick and easy. There’s also no upper limit on the number of tabs you can open.
BlackBerry 10's on-screen keyboard has large, well-spaced buttons that help cut down on mistakes. There is autocorrect for spell check and other grammatical mistakes.
One of the good features of BlackBerry, an instant messaging service, remains as good as ever, providing a cash-free way of sending messages to your friends, complete with several screens of cheerful emoticons. Say, a person standing near by you wants to add you to their contacts, then you have to call up a QR code that your friend waves their phone's camera in front of, and upon registering adds you to their contact list.
At the same time, the video calling feature of the phone is good and sound. A new app called Screen Share enables you to output your smart phone's display onto the screen of the person you're chatting with, or vice versa.
In terms of apps, although BlackBerry has tried hard to fill its BlackBerry World store with decent apps, there simply isn't much on offer.
Overall, the Z10 is superfast enough to handle most of the productivity, media consumption and app activities, without ever showing signs of strains. The Z10 comes with 16GB of on-board storage, which is a reasonable amount, but can be extended by inserting a microSD card.
According to IDC, BlackBerry 10 is set to battle it out with Windows Phone 8 for the No. 3 smartphone operating system worldwide in 2013, behind Android and Apple's iOS. While its grip has slipped in North America, BlackBerry has maintained a strong presence in such far-flung places as Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico and some South American countries.
