[Marc_Paradise]

I've been using BlackBerry for years and developing apps for almost as long. I had a dev alpha but until yesterday was using my 9900 as a daily driver. I mention this because it means there was no real learning curve for me - though in fairness, there was little learning curve even when it was new to me. The gestures are very intuitive in actual usage, even though they are not inherently discoverable.

The good:
* I haven't tested it yet but I think I will be nearly as fast on this keyboard as on the physical - and that was about 60-80 wpm. Some annoyances though, which I'll detail below.
* peek, flow, hub add up to a great user experience.
* five hours of heavy usage today and my battery is at about sixty percent. I expect once my usage tones down I'll easily go a long day on a charge.
* browser in top-notch though it is a little slow to open, and the fact that the address bar is always taking up screen real estate is very annoying. Especially in landscape mode.
* multitasking is great though I wish I could pin apps to specific positions.
*word prediction is creepily accurate.

The bad:
* notifications are a mess. The loss of per-account notifications is bad. The inability to customize notification volume, ring repeat count and vibrate settings for specific contacts is bad. The fact that you're dumped into an unfiltered list of every single song on your SD card when you want to choose a custom notification is quite bad. The unfortunate habit the phone has of deciding you want to be in silent mode is bad. The odd popping and partially-played notifications when you receive multiple messages at the same time is bad. I only hope some major, major improvements are coming here.
* speaker quality is not the best. Becomes tolerable only if you cup your hand under it to better direct the sound.
*annoying keyboard quirks: it doesn't understand the concept of hyphenated words at all. It insists on thinking that I would actually type "U" instead of "You", no matter how many times I correct it -annoying since I seem to have a habit of hitting "U" instead of the letter "I". I had hoped "Heat mapping" would correct this over time but so far no luck.
* fine cursor movement is hit or miss, and sometimes annoying inconsistent.
* inability to easily engage multi-selection on any list that supports it is frustrating. Tap and hold works, but is slow. Allowing me to customize the duration of a long tap would alleviate this.
* disappointed by the quantity of crappy pointless and low-quality apps BlackBerry is approving. And I still see standalone ebooks being accepted as "Apps" in bulk - polluting search results and recently added lists. I had hoped they would correct this under bb10 but I'd anything it's gotten worse in their drive to meet numbers for marketing purposes.
*my taps seem to get ignored about 2% of the time

The Indifferent:
* apps - maybe I've been conditioned by my time with BlackBerry but I find I don't care. The few apps I need are there or will be shortly. Mostly they're a distraction to doing useful things. I realize everybody has their own opinions on this. My comments about app world quality come from me speaking as a developer and not from my daily device use.

I realize that I've emphasized the bad here, but I want to be clear - i think this is a great device in spite of the things about it that annoy me. Even if they are not fixed I'm overall happy and have no interest in switching back to my old BB. I do find the ux much better than the time I spend with Android devices. I have no iphone experience to provide a basis for comparison.

I will continue to recommend this phone with a clear conscience to the "Hyper-connected" people it is intended for.

BlackBerry will not take back huge chunks of market with this phone - but I do not believe that this was ever their intention. So-called reporters who want to imply failure because there are no sellouts seem to disregard this completely.

I remain long BBRY.