The IT Nerd

This is a pivotal week for BlackBerry. Americans will finally get their hands on BlackBerry 10 devices and we’ll finally see if BlackBerry is going to be a player in the smartphone game, or if they are headed for the dustbin. Thus the timing is perfect for Rogers to hand over a BlackBerry Z10 for me to review.

The Z10 is a thin light phone. It is longer than the iPhone 5 by a bit and it is thinner as well. It feels good in your and and fits into any pocket just fine. It feels solidly constructed. Pop the back and you can slip in a MicroSD card to supplement the 16GB of internal storage. The screen is very sweet being 1280 x 768 resolution with 356 ppi and is 4.2″ in size. It’s bright easy to read, though it is a glossy screen which means that glare can sometimes become an issue. It also attracts fingerprints like crazy. In fact, if you don’t keep wiping the fingerprints off the screen, the screen becomes slightly difficult to look at. One of the things that caught my attention was the Micro HDMI port that allows you to hook the Z10 up to your HDTV or projector. I tried it and it works perfectly. With very little effort, I was able put videos onto my HDTV.

Now, on to the big piece of Z10 which is the software. The BlackBerry 10 OS took me 15 minutes to figure out and I was quickly able to start, multitask, and use apps.  In fact, once you figure out not to treat the Z10 like an iPhone or like a older BlackBerry, it’s shockingly easy to use. I’ll also note that Playbook users will be right at home as all of the gestures that the Z10 uses will be familiar to them. In either case, I would use the word “intuitive” to describe how easy this phone is to use. Not only that, but everything in the user interface feels and looks fluid and smooth.

Some things jump out at me:

• The Hub is where everything such as Twitter mentions, E-mail, text messages, notifications is located. Other applications such as the pictures application can send e-mail.  If you’re looking for a separate e-mail client, you won’t find one and you will not miss it either. Overall, it is handy to have everything in one place and this feature gets a thumbs up from me.
  
• The Maps application now does turn by turn navigation that includes speech that reads street names. It’s competent at what it does. But it isn’t consistent in terms of reading out directions. I found that in the city, it would read out street names. But on the highway it was hit and miss. That forced me to look at the phone to see what it wanted me to do. That of course defeats the purpose of having navigation software that does turn by turn navigation. Another weak point, if you’re in an area with weak cell service, you’ll see that it is VERY slow to come up with a route. I suspect that this is done somewhere other than the phone. Still, at least they integrated their maps and navigation apps so that you can do it all from one app (rather than having maps and BlackBerry Traffic). That’s an improvement. But Nokia and Google do navigation on smart phones much better. If there is a weakness to this phone, this is it.
• The new BlackBerry World application not only does apps, but it does music, TV shows and movies. The selection of movies and music is pretty good as I was able to pull up almost anything I was looking for. TV shows fall under the your mileage may vary category. Shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter weren’t there, but I found Gossip Girl and Smallville for example.
• The Browser application supports Flash. That means that any web page works on the Z10. Though I will note that Flash laden pages are slow to load for whatever reason.
• It has a voice control application that reminds me of Apple’s Siri. Compared to what was in BlackBerry products before the Z10, this is a quantum leap forward as it allowed me to do anything that I needed to do via voice and the recognition quality is pretty good.

Another thing that got my attention is how fast this phone is on LTE. Downstream speeds were 44 Mbps with upstream speeds being 14 Mbps according to Speedtest.net. For those of you keeping score at home, that is almost twice as fast as my wife’s iPhone 5. Impressive.

So far, this phone is impressing me. Tune in tomorrow to see what the camera is like and to see if I am still impressed.

This entry was posted on March 18, 2013 at 8:47 am and is filed under Products with tags BlackBerry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.