BlackBerry Presents BB10 OS
Last week, saw RIM reveal their new BlackBerry 10 OS and the Z10 and Q10 smartphones.
With their new avatar as BlackBerry, the firm has to convince its loyal user base that it’s still capable of producing decent products while winning back users who had switched to other platforms.
The main focus in BB10, or Blackberry 10, has been on content aggregation and the BB Hub, which shows you notifications related to email, Facebook, BBM, LinkedIn, etc. Third-party applications can also add themselves to the Hub. Hub alerts are issued simply by the flashing of a red LED on the phone and a sound.
Also, apps keep running in the background, and nothing is paused. Should you peek at the Hub, your current app will continue running. BlackBerry calls this multitasking implementation “Flow”. Continuing its theme of content aggregation, BB10 pulls photos from LinkedIn when you’re looking at meeting details, and collects as much information as it can about contacts.
The next feature is BlackBerry Balance, which gives you a ‘work’ and ‘home’ profile. Each profile contains a set of applications. “Work” applications can be configured according to your enterprise, but should you want, the “home” profile will enable you to use personal, non-work apps and a different app store than the one accessible with the “work” profile. BB10 extends BBM as well. The new feature is called BBM Video Chat with Screen Share, which not only allows you to start a video call, but you can also remotely share your screen’s contents with another BB10 user. The Camera app in BB10 allows you to click a photo just by tap and they also have a feature called “Time shift”, which captures a few frames instead of a single shot, allowing you to then select the best frame.
Another nice stock app is the BB10 Story Maker, which is a movie making app. You select stuff like pictures, movies and music, and the software combines them into a movie.
The app store for BB10 is Blackberry World, which promises to be a one-stop shop for music, games, videos, and of course, apps. Their store has 70,000 apps at present, out of which Skype, Kindle, WhatsApp and Angry Birds are some of the well-known ones. The two phones they launched are the Z10 and the Q10, the Z10 being an all-touch phone with a 4.2 inch IPS display sporting a 1280x768 resolution. The Q10 has a 3.1-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 720x720 pixels and QWERTY keyboard. Both phones are powered by a 1.5 GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 processor by Qualcomm, and 2 GB RAM.
They also have replaceable batteries and a microSD slot (in addition to 16GB of internal storage), NFC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support, 1080p recording and playback via a rear 8MP camera and 720p recording via the front 2MP camera. Materials used are plastic, stainless steel and “hardened” glass. Device availability is expected between February and April across various countries, with no talk of India just jet.
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