As promised, Blackberry has finally pulled the wraps off from its first Blackberry 10 based smartphone called Z10. Although Blackberry, formerly known as RIM hasn’t talked much about the tech specs, but it did talk about new features in BB10. This is the first touch enabled smartphone from Blackberry on BB10 apart from other smartphone Q10 which has a physical QWERTY keyboard in addition to a touch screen interface.
Blackberry has taken the approach of gesture based OS which we see in Harmattan UI in selected Nokia smartphones such as N9 and then added certain modifications to call it BB10. It means that there’s no home button like iPhone where you need to press it anytime you want to come out of any application. Here, you just need a swipe up gesture to enter on the backgrounding page and another swipe on the left for the home screen.
According to Blackberry, they have seen huge contribution from many developers across the world and their BB World would have 19,000 apps on the day of launch. In addition to it, there are certain popular apps in every category such as Twitter, Whatsapp, Foursquare, Angry Birds, Facebook which are committed specifically for this platform. However, they have priced Z10 for $199 on 3 years of contract in US.
This price point is somehow similar to what iPhone 5 is priced in US. Considering the limited app ecosystem, an entirely new OS and an all new Blackberry experience based on gestures, we are skeptical if people would want to go out and give Blackberry an another chance instead of an iPhone 5. Perhaps, if you are in an enterprise and if they prefer a Blackberry, you might want to keep one of these two announced Blackberry devices today.
We have not tried Z10 yet, so we can’t actually compare the battery life of both devices. But Blackberry says that all apps offers real multitasking unlike iPhone where most of the apps enters in suspended state in background. Also, the keyboard seems quite impressive where you can type with one thumb, simply by flicking the appeared letters on specific keys. The Blackberry hub provides to check what’s happening on almost all popular social networking sites in an elegant way.
Undoubtedly, there are some of the things which Z10 has surely missed like an absence of voice assistant. But we believe that it would make its way in future if Blackberry finds itself in good position to continue. It might be refreshing, but Blackberry Z10 is still not yet there to really compete with iPhone 5.
What do you think? Does it have the capability to become iPhone competitor? Let’s know in comment section below.