By:
iPadfanzz staff on January 31, 2013
Canada's tech giant Research In Motion Ltd, has launched the much delayed BlackBerry 10 with much fanfare and with a slew of new features and innovations. The two new phones are Z10, which is a touchscreen device and Q10 that retains the famous keyboard that has built much of BlackBerry’s growth. The new devices come with lots of new features that will keep the company’s customers happy.
At an event in New York City, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, the company announced the two new phones which it has been working for the past two years.
The Z10First in the pack is the Z10 which features a full touchscreen interface, and lacks physical QWERTY keyboard. It is a compact phone with a screen size of 4.2-inches and closer to the iPhone. On the screen there are only three physical buttons – power on top, volume up and down on the right side, so overall the phone has a clean design. The screen comes with a 1280 x 768 screen resolution and that comes to 356 pixel per inch. The smartphone is powered by a dual-core CPU clocked to 1.5GHz with 2GB RAM. The Z10 has 16 GB mass memory but this can be expanded to 32GB.
The phone has an eight megapixel rear camera with 1080 pixel video-recording capacity and a two megapixel camera with 720 pixel video-recording. Connectivity includes Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC support.
The Z10 is 130 millimeters (5.1 inches) in length and weighs 137 grams – slightly longer and heavier than the iPhone 5.
The Q10The Q10 has been re-designed and re-invented for the BlackBerry 10 platform and offers customers a powerful mobile computing experience. The phone has a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. It also has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM and 16GB mass memory. The device supports LTE.
"Combined with the 4G LTE network and service plans from Sprint, BlackBerry Q10 customers will be delighted with a re-invented communication experience, seamless multitasking, easy access to multiple social networks and the peace of mind that BlackBerry security gives them," the company said in a press release.
BlackBerry 10 OSAt the heart of both the devices is BlackBerry 10, a polished, multipurpose and world class operating system that gives users a single interface for the customers to see, for instance, your work and home calendar. Colors in the OS are rich and icons large enough to easily touch, and animations flow smoothly. Especially the fade that you see when slowly swiping from one screen to the next, is what really catches your eye. In a nutshell, the new layout of the new Os combines a handful of playing ars spread out in an overlapping row. To the far left, you’ve got BlackBerry Hub, the universal inbox where you can see all your messages and notification alerts. And to the right of it there’s the "Active Frame" area, a nerdy name to represent the multitasking screen that stores up to eight thumbnails of your open apps. To its right again you’ll see your pages of app icons, which you can rearrange, delete, and plop on top of each other to create folders. The good part is you can access the dialer, universal search, and camera from every screen.
If you select work, the photos you take with the BB10 camera are stored in a different place to those you take with it in personal mode. As one BlackBerry executive put it, “If you get fired, you don’t want the boss to delete all the photos you took of your kids”.
The new operating system combines all social networks, emails, messages and other communications into a single inbox. There are apps and icons that users can easily work with. There is a notification hub.
In terms of multitasking, even if there’s an app in the background, it doesn’t stop. There is Siri-like functinality in BB10 OS and users can dial number with voice commands. A lot of big-ticket apps are already available.
BlackBerry Social HubIT’s the way how you’ll connect to all the important social networking sites into one place. Users can manage all their social settings from the hub as all they need to do is to slide to the right to go to the Hub and manage all their notifications from within this without having to open separate apps for each of the services.
BlackBerry MessengerNow coming to the most important part for an professional user – the new BlackBerry Messenger in BB 10 – which now comes with the option of video-calling as well. The users get services like messaging services and with the option of video calling, hard-core BB users have another good reason to stay on. There’s a new feature called Screen Share which lets you share your screens with one another while you are in the middle of a video call. So now users can share pics, books, spreadsheets, documents, books, etc. all in real-time.
BlackBerry BalanceThe new feature allows users to switch modes with gestures on the homescreen. So now you can split work apps from personal apps.
Typing on the BlackBerryGiven that efficiency is the most important thing for a corporat warrior, the BlackBerry now emphasises on typing with one thumb. When typing, the BB10 keyboard allows users to flick words upward to form sentences in a flash or swipe a finger horizontally to quickly delete. The keyboard also comes with built-in multi-language support that’s accessible with a gesture and the phone will recognise when users switch languages in the middle of the email, again a move aimed at markets like India.
BlackBerry Story MakerYou can now create slideshows with music, transitions, captions, photos and video right on your device. You can aggregate video and music content into one stream.
BlackBerry World and AppsWhile presenting the new smartphones and the new software to the public, the key question before Research in Motion (RIM) President and Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins, was how will it have the apps that people are now addicted to play on their iPhone and Android phones.
“The company has worked with software developers to stock its BlackBerry World store, which includes apps and music and movies, to have 70,000 apps out of the gate. RIM announced that popular apps like Facebook, Skype, Kindle, Twitter, Angry Birds, Evernote, Rdio, ESPN Scorecenter, Flixter and Cut the Rope will be in the store for consumers,” Heins said.
E-mailRIM has not lost its flavour in carrying the long loved tradition of the email to BlackBerry 10 OS. You can flag messages, mark messages as unread, file them by folder, and invite the contact to a meeting.
The new BlackBerry 10 has created a lot of buzz among technology watchers as well as financial analysts, as it offers a great third alternative in the already crowded smartphone market. The company’s future a lot depends on the new operating system as well as the smartphones which it hopes with help it to claw its way back into an industry now dominated by Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy. However, success will come only if consumer and business customers embrace the new technology happily.
RIM launched its first BlackBerry back in 1999 for corporate executives to stay in touch with their clients and their offices, and the company quickly cornered the market for secure corporate and government emails. However, with the onset of new OS, its star faded with a 3.4 percent global showing in the fourth quarter - down from 20 percent three years before. Its North American market share is even smaller - a mere 2 percent in the fourth quarter.
ResponseThe Z10 device won a lukewarm review from The Wall Street Journal's tech blogger Walt Mossberg, who complained of a shortage of apps.
David Pogue of The New York Times, apologized for describing BlackBerry as doomed in the past. The Z10 touchscreen device was "lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas," he said.
The BlackBerry Z10 will be available in Canada on Feb. 5 and in the U.K. early next month. In the U.S. it will be available in March. RIM says the Z10 will be sold for a suggested retail price of $199 with a two-year contract; an unlocked version will be sold for $599.
