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 30th January 2013
Research in Motion (RIM) are no more. To coincide with the launch
of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, the company will
now be called just "BlackBerry" and carries the tagline
"One brand. One promise." BlackBerry 10 is very much a
rebirth for the company, and it is a radically different proposition
from the tired old BlackBerry operating systems that we are used
to.
The new BlackBerry 10 ("BB10") operating system is
built on their own operating system, QNX. RIM bought QNX nearly
three years ago, but although QNX has a reputation as a rock-solid
operating system it didn't have a UI that could be used on handheld
devices, so that (and many other components) had to be written from
scratch. Even so, three years is a long time in the mobile phone
industry and things have moved on substantially since then. During
that period RIM's market share eroded significantly, and many people
see this as being the company's last chance to remain a major player.
On the surface, BlackBerry 10 appears to be much more contemporary
than Android or the iPhone out of the box, but it doesn't go as
far as Windows Phone 8 which some people think goes too far
from traditional designs. The interface makes use of various gestures
to control applications, it is designed for easy multitasking (swiping
the bottom of the screen bring up all running apps, for example).
You can also peek from one application to another, for example to
quickly check email while doing something else, and pulling down
the screen reveals the calendar without closing the current application.
The interface is designed to be used with a single hand, and some
considerable work appears to have gone into the whole experience.
 BlackBerry
10 aggregates information from various sources in one place, for
example email, SMS, social networking and BBM messages appear in
one screen. Slightly creepily, BB10 will also pull together the
personal details of contacts from places like LinkedIn and Facebook
and builds up a dossier about them, including photographs and birthdays
if they are available. BlackBerry say that one of the key markets
are "hyper connected" customers who use social network
a lot.
BlackBerry 10 is also designed to support both work and home
profiles and move easily between them (called "BlackBerry
Balance"), which is ideal if you want to bring your own
device to work (known as BYOD). One part of the device can be fully
managed by the company that the user works for, but the other part
is logically separate and private.
BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is a big issue for many users,
and now it has been updated for video calling. You can also share
the BlackBerry's screen across BBM, which is ideal for business
collaboration. BBM is a key differentiator for BlackBerry and is
just about one of the only things that BlackBerry remains relatively
unchallenged.
BlackBerry Remember is a personal information management
(PIM) tool that is a unified way of storing documents, web addresses,
notes and media relating to certain tasks, also all in one place.
Unlike more traditional PIMs, Remember looks like it might actually
be useful for managing your personal information.
 The
camera has touch focus, and allows time shifting where effectively
you can choose the best stills shot from a short video clip. Pictures
can be edited on the device, which nicely sidesteps the need to
use a service like Instagram if you want to retouch the photo before
sharing. The "BlackBerry Story Maker" is another
novel application, which allows film clips, pictures and audio to
be combined together to make a short movie clip.
Several major movie and music labels have signed up to allow
content to be bought through the BlackBerry World application store,
which until now has been a collection of pretty uninspiring applications.
When it comes to apps, BlackBerry have tried very hard to build
up a decent collection before launch, with 70,000 applications available
at launch with 1000 "top applications" available, but
for all we know the other 69,000 could be fart apps. On the serious
side, Skype, Amazon Kindle, Whatsapp, Foursquare and Angry Birds
will all be available for the BlackBerry 10 platform.
Two devices will be available at launch, the BlackBerry Z10 is
a full touchscreen device with a 4.2" display, the BlackBerry
Q10 comes with a traditional keyboard. In the UK the Z10 will be
available from tomorrow, with other major markets coming next week.
All-in-all, BlackBerry 10 looks very promising. The problem is
that it is also rather late and rivals have carved up most
of the smartphone market for themselves, squeezing BlackBerry out.
However, the upcoming Z10 and Q10 devices look like "must have"
gadgets for BlackBerry fans. Hopefully for BlackBerry's sake, there
will be enough of them about to rescue the company from its current
problems.
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