On January 30, 2013, RIM (Research in Motion) announced that the company will officially be known as BlackBerry.





Let me start by saying this: I really wanted to fall in love with BlackBerry 10 OS. Overhauling and reinventing a mobile operating system is a tremendous undertaking, and one that deserves respect for the blood, sweat, and tears that go into designing and coding an entire platform from the ground up. In this case, it's based on QNX, a version of which also powered the BlackBerry PlayBook. You expect a few bobbles here and oversights there, and if there's one thing that the beleaguered handset maker needs right now, it's a break.

In many ways, RIM's hard work has paid off. With its richly designed graphical interface, BlackBerry 10 is a mobile OS for grown-ups. Its spin on the virtual keyboard gives RIM plenty to boast about, its enhanced BlackBerry Messenger app is exactly as it should be, and the innovative BlackBerry Balance feature will be a certain type of business user's dream. There are media features, to be sure, and games at the ready, but given a choice of all available handsets, few teens and tweens will thirst for BlackBerry's button-up aesthetic.

Based entirely on taps and gestures, the OS takes a little time to get used to, and some front-end behaviors are odd, or inconvenient, or just plain don't make sense. There's no single, overarching failure I can point to, but rather, a growing list of missing features and aggravating issues that take their toll in the aggregate; not a single fatal blow, but a thousand paper cuts. These represent the little details that can make or break an experience, and they're the kinds of things that RIM should have ironed out in all these years of development.

Editors' note: This review is based on early impressions after a full week of use on the BlackBerry Z10 review unit that BlackBerry seeded to select press; rating is subject to change as we spend more time with the device and operating system.

Interface and navigation

From the first, I really connected to BlackBerry 10's visual design. It is, in a word, polished, and perfectly picks up the thread of BlackBerry's previous design language. Colors are rich, icons are large enough to easily touch, and animations flow smoothly. One example: the fade you see when slowly swiping from one screen to the next.

There are some exceptions, though. RIM's designers forgot to update the look and feel of the settings menu, which just reverts us to the Old BlackBerry.

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New BlackBerry is entirely gesture-driven, its layout sort of resembling a handful of playing cards 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. To the right of that is the "Active Frame" area, a nerdy name to represent the multitasking screen that stores up to eight thumbnails of your open apps. Move right again to see your pages of app icons, which you can rearrange, delete, and plop on top of each other to create folders. You can access the dialer, universal search, and camera from every screen.

For the most part, you'll use the usual swipes up, down, left, and right, though there are two special moves to know. First, you can swipe up from bottom of the screen to wake the phone (you can use the lock screen buttons as well). Second, there's the "Peek" gesture, where you quickly pull your finger up and to the right, as if tracing a perfect right angle. This temporarily suspends your app so you can glance at your notifications in the Hub. Lift up and you close the app and jump to the Hub. Keep your finger pressed to the screen, and you can return to the app without losing your place. I like Peek.

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Closing out of an app requires the most coaching, but it isn't hard. You swipe up from the bottom until the app shrinks in size. Let go and it becomes a thumbnail in the multitasking window. You can then close it by tapping the X.

As you navigate around, you'll notice that BB10's menus aren't entirely consistent. Sometimes you long-press to surface the context menu, other times you pull down or swipe over to the right gutter. Sometimes you'll find more options in a dedicated menu button, one that "borrows" the same ellipsis design used with Windows Phone and Android 4.x.

The lock screen (or "Standby screen") gives you a read-only glimpse of your awaiting messages (you can't act on them from here), and a camera icon you can hold and press to open.

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Not everyone will love RIM's lack of navigational buttons, but I don't mind using gestures myself. What does bother me, however, is that any time you tap to open an app, the operating system first scoots you to the Active Frames window before launching. This extraneous step complicates what should be a smooth, logical action -- seriously, what could be easier than opening an app? I don't really care what happens on the back end, but seeing every app open from the multitasking window is just jerky and unnecessary.

At times it's possible to get lost in the OS, especially as you're just picking it up. For example, from your notifications, you can swipe deeper left to access the Hub submenu. But if you swipe right again, you might cover up the notifications window with another window instead. For the most part, it doesn't take long to get into the flow of things, but a user guide is necessary when you're just getting started.

Basic smartphone features

As with all of today's mobile operating systems, BlackBerry 10 supports multiple e-mail addresses, calendars, and social-networking accounts.

There's support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, mobile hot spot, VPN, and Internet tethering. You'll find airplane mode, DLNA sharing, and accessibility features, including a magnification gesture, hearing aid support, and settings for TTY for teletypewriters.

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Your BlackBerry ID forms the backbone; you enter it or create it when you first boot up your BB10 device.

This might be a good time to mention that RIM included an interesting feature, Bedtime Mode, which turns off all chirps, buzzes, and incoming calls until the alarm sounds. It's a good, useful, likable idea, until you realize that while working on the details of the grander plan, RIM somehow forgot to include more than three alarm tones. If that weren't bad enough, of this trio, only one's a real ditty. The other two are a series of repetitive, soul-enraging beeps.

On the plus side, BlackBerry 10 OS also supports screenshots. On the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone, you capture a shot of the screen by pressing down on both volume buttons at once. It's pretty handy.

Virtual keyboard

Here are seven things I like about RIM's virtual keyboard:

• It has a clean layout

• It's responsive

• It stores up to three languages at a time; just type naturally and it'll take care of the rest

• You can press and hold a letter to capitalize or grab an alternate symbol

• You can swipe left on the Clear key to delete full words

• It creatively presents flickable word predictions

• It has great autocorrection

In some screens, you'll see a row of numbers capping the four rows of letters. Word predictions work two ways. In its default mode, the predictive word pops up between the rows of letters, corresponding to the next letter you may type. You can also adjust settings to see predictions hover at the top of the keyboard instead. To add a word, flick it up toward the composition area.

I like RIM's creative approach to predictions, but I found that words were small and hard to read and that this method of flicking didn't fit into my work flow. In the end, it was often faster and easier to just type the whole word. Luckily, autocorrect took care of my many errors. RIM says the keyboard adapts to your typing style and finger placement over time.

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One thing I noticed is that predictions weren't available from every third-party app. For example, you won't get any help when you're logging in to Facebook, in the universal search window, or when signing on to a Wi-Fi network, two places where adding your username or .com suffix would be quite helpful. Trial and error teaches that pressing and holding the keyboard's spacebar retracts it.

If you'd rather talk than type, the keyboard accepts voice dictation. It helps to keep things simple, and if you'd like punctuation, you'll have to say it yourself. Unfortunately, voice dictation takes time to process, and it isn't smart enough to capitalize words at the beginning of a new sentence.

Browser

In some ways, BlackBerry 10's tabbed, WebKit-based browser is pretty standard. It's fueled by HTML 5, and you can also toggle on Adobe Flash support in the settings. Though it mines Bing search results by default, you can reset to the Google or Yahoo engines.

Double-tapping quickly zooms you in and out to make the page much more readable, and reader mode automatically adjusts page width and makes it easy to increase or decrease front size. Other tools include find-on-page search, bookmarks and history, private browsing, and a whitelist for permissions.

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That's all well and good, but heavy browser use is where the inconsistencies bubble up, many of them having to do with rendering issues. Some mobile Web pages didn't render correctly, and it routinely took a very long time for Wikipedia pictures and Google Maps images to load in search results -- in some cases, minutes, even with the full power of 4G LTE. However, I suspect that I have an issue with my particular testing phone, so I'll revisit this when my new review unit arrives.

The browser also tripped up when I tried clicking phone numbers to call businesses from Web pages. I could often click to call from Google Local search results, but had to copy and paste numbers from Yelp and OpenTable. You'd also better forget clicking maps in Google's search results to open the Maps app; you'll only reload the search results page.

When the browser worked at quickly loading Web pages, it worked well, and I liked that opening a new tab didn't whisk you away from your current page. Instead, you see a badge that stars your new page in the tab menu.

Voice Control

To say that voice assistants have caught on is an understatement. BlackBerry 10's new Voice Control app places its usual commands within the context of a voice assistant that talks back to you. Sure, it looks like a 'Berry-ized version of Apple's Siri, but like most Siri knockoffs it responds to precise commands, rather than to Siri's conversational language. For instance, you can command Voice Control to open the weather app or search the Internet for weather information, but you can't ask it what the weather will be like, or if you'll need an umbrella.

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It also doesn't help that Voice Control sounds like a robot. A friendly female one, but a robot nonetheless. I won't fault the app for its particular speech requirements, but I do fault it for being slow, and for its frequent connection errors during my testing period. Still, I was able to search the Internet, leave myself reminder notes, schedule appointments, and dictate very short, simple messages.

E-mail

Always one of BlackBerry's strengths, RIM's thorough e-mail tradition is carried on in BlackBerry 10 OS. You can flag messages, mark messages as unread, file them by folder, and invite the contact to a meeting.

When you're composing a message, BlackBerry 10 goes the extra mile, allowing you to attach various files, format text, and change text color. Is the e-mail urgent? You can mark its importance. Want to process a lot of e-mails at once? No problem, you can file, flag, mark as read, and delete in a batch.

The OS is good at popping up contacts as you type, but the second you tap the Compose button, it suggests two contacts you might want to address. The problem with this is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the same two names I keep seeing; they're certainly not the two I've contacted most often.