1. Neoeye's Avatar
    Hello,

    First of all thank you for this website that I have had the pleasure to read pieces of from time to time, BB user for 7 years with a 8100 and a 9790 that broke last week. I hate tactile keyboards with a passion and value battery life and messaging... So I bought myself a Q10.

    Using my Q10 for a few days now and I'm heavily disappointed! I hope you could help me understand the goals/philosophy of the device, if not, how to potentially customize it... And if no solution is to be found, I'm selling it back and buying myself a old 9790!!!! Yes the Q10 has some fine points, no doubt, but it doesn't do what I need it to do for now. Hopefully we can correct it.

    First of all: my phone is a communication and organizing device. Multimedia comes second. What I want is to know what appointments I might have, linked to Facebook for events/birthdays, and instantly know who wants to tell me what, would it be phone, SMS, Mail or Facebook message.

    I loved my 8100 for one reason: It had that main page that looked like that on 8310:
    Attachment 322313
    See, I just grabbed my phone, woke it up, and in one eyesight I knew who was telling me what, sms & mail, and upcoming events. I can't think of anything more efficient, and even my 9790 was not as good. Let's divide it in two: I grab my phone in my pocket, it was locked, I'm just checking: I don't unlock my phone and just press a key to wake it up,yet I still get an instant glimpse at everything that's going on without clicking anything. Something interests me, I unlock the phone and click on said item. done.

    The 9790 was not nearly as good. There is a notification bar in the top of the screen, but It only has icons with numbers. So if I take the same scenario, I grab the phone in my pocket, press a key but don't unlock it: I get to see if I have notifications and what kind of. But I don't know who, when or what. I want to know, I have to unlock it, click on the notifications bar to know. I now have the 3 following items in my calendar, and the rest: calls, sms, mail.That was less efficient!!! But the phone had a full keyboard and linked to Facebook.

    Comes the Q10. Nervous laugh. Same scenario, I grab the phone in my pocket, just want to check. I have to press the top "unlock" button or press on "6", to not unlock it and just wake it up. I have a notifications screen with **only one** (?????) event, the next one to come. Icons on the left tell me if I have messages/fb/... and how many... But I have to click on them to know from who and preview them ! Say I have an SMS and a FB message, it takes quite some time for something I could previously check instantly.

    What's worse is that even if I received an SMS, the notification screen is not going to start centered on it, it will still tell me about my next calendar event. Yes thank you, you showed it to me 20 times already today, I got it, but I received a message, and that's what I f*** want to know! From there on, double click on an item to open it (clicking once was not enough?).

    If I unlock the phone (that swipe gesture wake up is superb!), I have nothing except a blinking notification light to tell me wether or not something's going on!!!!!!!!! I have to do that upward swipe and hold to get icons that tell me how many SMS/Mails/etc I must check, and I need to go to the hub to actually check them. While the gestures are a lovely thing.... This is just inefficient and to me unsafe, I don't want to miss a message!!!!!

    Now to the hub. Yeah, well done. Nice update to the one that was in BB7, sure, mixed with the notifications panel. But it has its grips. First, it does not display calendar events by default, you have to swipe down to reveal them... And then it only displays events for the day and one of the next day. If I have an important event in 3 days and nothing in between... It won't show. Thanks.

    And from there, if I reply to an sms message, and directly lock the phone/leave the message app by upward swipe. I do my stuff, grab back the phone, go to the hub to check what's going on... And I'm back on the message app to what I replied, I have to go back to the hub root to get my notifications. If I click on the "messages" app icon, it filters only the sms messages in the hub, something I often want to do. You'd hope the next time you call the hub you still have the full hub... Nope! You're still stuck into messages and have to select back the "hub" folder! Again, recipe for lost notifications.

    And the message apps... It uses these pretty bubbles to hold the text and while the screen is bigger, you just see less because of them. At least on 9790 you could disable them and tell the phone to use plain text and colors. A lot more screen efficient. FB message app was greatly improved... But come on, a 2cm by 1 cm reply box? And not even a trackpad anymore to scroll through it? xD

    My words for this inefficient behavior could easily become rude. Yes the phone has a big nice screen, the keyboard is stellar and now correction and word suggestion do mean something (the 9790 was just horrible with french accents...), it is fast, GPS is accurate and well integrated into calendar which is better also, contact management is excellent, the phone app is quite good, I now have Skype Whatsapp and Snapchat, the Pictures app is better, the camera is... well, greatly improved at least, headphone out quality is way better, etc.

    But it just doesn't act as a good communication center anymore. In fact, apart from its keyboard, it gets beaten by Androids and iPhones on that topic. Which was the heart of a BB. What were they thinking?????

    Are some aspects of it reworked in the 10.3.1? Are there ways to configure it to make it work my way?
    I can't say i'd be thrilled to buy again an old 9790 or 9900 that is now unsupported...

    Thank you,
    Nicolas

    PS: Oh, and the music app, another example of stupid ergonomics. No more next/previous through the volume button???? What if I have my phone in my pocket and want to skip a song? I have to actually grab my phone, unlock it, go to the music app... And then it shows the artwork but no buttons, I have to click on it to be able to show the next/previous and the pause button that will finally allow me to stop it if I want to!
    12-21-14 07:54 PM
  2. killkenny1's Avatar
    TL;DR
    For your last issue hold volume rockers to change songs, up for next song, down for previous.
    12-22-14 03:51 AM
  3. Neoeye's Avatar
    It's how it always worked but there might be something broken in my firmware because... It doesn't!
    But of course, this is far from the main problem.

    Solutions I could see: that the "swipe to unlock" lands directly onto the hub would improve it. It could even have both: hub gesture on black screen goes to up, going up goes to lockscreen or multitasker. You should be able to configure what your gestures do anyway. And a way to set the hub to display more calendar events, and an option to not auto hide calendar. Plus an option that whenever you arrive to the hub you're always at the root of the hub, so that it can still serve as a notification center even if you previously focused on answering a text message... Because without it, the Q10 pretty much goes without a notification system!!!

    I would love to love it, there are some good things but... Let's face it, an Android with a quality keyboard would just kill a blackberry, now. Battery life can't really get me 2 full days (I might have 40h, but not 48) on extremely light and cautious usage, on a normal moderate usage it will last the day but not any more... That said I let my 9790 stuck in "2G/Edge" because otherwise my battery would drain too fast. That got me 2 full days, and I could cautiously juice almost a full third one.
    Radio reception on that Q10 is also a joke, it became worse than a small Galaxy s5 Mini. Which is a shame given that I was always proud to always hook onto a network on my previous berries, right when every one else had lost connection long time ago. Really that same goal, an efficient means of communication....
    12-22-14 06:36 AM
  4. blueyestm's Avatar
    To turn on the music shortcuts you need to go to the settings and main volume and make sure music shortcuts is actually on
    12-22-14 12:00 PM
  5. Neoeye's Avatar
    Thanks, I completely missed this option! So that's one sorted haha.
    I upgraded to 10.3.1 to see if we were going a direction I like... They made the FB reply box larger, and the text selector slightly easier to handle, that's cool.

    But as far as notifications are concerned, I still want to say this is a piece of... Add to that a weak radio and a strong tendency to eat batteries within the day and we're quite at the opposite of why I am using Blackberries!

    So I'll give it a few more days, but I'm 90% on the "sell it and buy back yourself a 9790 or 9900" slope. 10.3.1 is not going the way I want, Q10 won't support 10.4, so I'll pass, use the old model, and hope they get their act together on a future phone release. They released the Classic, they are going back to their roots, hey they might bring back a viable notification system! Then I'll upgrade.

    Would there be a competitor I'd have switched... Not like the apps, even with its pseudo support of android apks, are stellar nor is multimedia (better, yes, but not enough to really compete with a Galaxy or iPhone... And I have both a Galaxy S1 and iPhone 4s lying around, the old Galaxy S1 with Cyanogenmod/Android 4.4 still beats the Q10 in apps and multimedia! How old is that phone????).

    So you don't get a BB for multimedia and apps, even today. You get it for messaging. If it fails to deliver, then it just becomes a meh phone...
    ... just the only meh phone with a keyboard.
    12-23-14 02:03 PM
  6. blueyestm's Avatar
    With the message apps - is it a particular app because I don't have bubbles on any of mine, hate them. There is options to turn them off in the apps I use that offer it.

    Oh and in 10.3.1 there's an option in the hub settings to auto go back to main hub after a period of time.
    12-24-14 10:04 PM

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