[ubizmo]

So, I've had the Z10 for almost a week. My smartphone career has been: SideKick for almost four years; BB 8320 to 8900 to 9780 to 9900; then HTC Radar for a couple of months; Samsung Galaxy Blaze 4G for about 9 months; now back to BB with Z10.

I'm 59, due to be a grandfather by the end of the month.

I was psyched to buy the Z10 back on January 30 when it was launched, but of course couldn't do so (without spending more than I was prepared to spend at that point). So between then and last week I followed things pretty closely here on CB. I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. I knew I'd be giving up some apps that I was used to on Android, and I knew I'd be giving up Swype, which I had come to like a lot.

I decided I was okay with that. Here are my reasons:

1. As a PlayBook owner, I know what it means to wait for apps and have little confidence that they will ever appear. But during the two months since the global launch I've watched BBWorld and app launch announcements here on CB, and I'm fairly encouraged. There is, in my opinion, much more app momentum going for BB10 than there ever was for the PB. One of those apps that I missed, Tapatalk, appeared in BBWorld this morning. I don't mind Android ports, as long as they work. I understand that early versions/ports of anything will need updates; version 1.0 of anything has problems.

2. I didn't expect to adjust easily to the virtual keyboard in WP and Android, and I was just wrong. I'd have been foolish to repeat the error with the Z10. I'm discovering exactly what others have said: The best way to use the Z10 keyboard is "full speed ahead," don't worry about accuracy, just let the software do its thing. It's not a problem. Maybe the Z10 will eventually get SwiftKey's "flow" version of Swype, and maybe it won't. Either way I'm okay. It's working for me.

I'm not going to give my litany of suggestions for improvement, since there's already a comprehensive thread for that. So this is just my impressions of the user experience, after less than a week.

-- The peek and flow way of doing things takes just a short time to get used to, and then when you do you wonder why it wasn't always done like that.

-- "Reader mode" really isn't an adequate substitute for zoom-reflow in Android/BBOS browsers.

-- The camera is exceeding my expectations. I'm getting some nice photos and video clips.

-- Battery life is decent. I had some email setup issues (described in another thread) that caused me to have to install and delete one email account about twenty times, and this sort of thing can chew up the battery, but it really wasn't too bad. I bought BeWeather and keep it open as an active frame most of the time, updating hourly. I'm not seeing that drain the battery noticeably faster.

-- I send audio messages via email, and as yet I haven't figured out how to do that using Remember. I can create voice notes in Remember, but I don't see a way to send them. But there's a nice little app called Voice-eMailer that gets the job done nicely.

-- Some people have complained about lag, but I've found everything to be smooth as silk.

-- The screen brightness handling still needs work. It's supposed to get a bit dimmer when the ambient light is very low, but I think it's overdoing it.

-- I think the user experience is going to take a giant leap forward when the APIs for headless/background apps are finally released to developers.

-- The call clarity is outstanding. The speaker loudness, for listening to podcasts and music, is about the same as it was on the Samsung Blaze. It's okay, but could be better.

The email account problem I mentioned above was frustrating, and could have ended badly, but it's working now. It's not clear that the fault was/is entirely BlackBerry's. I just don't know. The missing app that I miss the most is Audible. The Podcast app I'm using, "Podcasts", isn't yet as polished as PodKicker on Android, but I'm confident that either it will get better or better options will appear in BBWorld.

In conclusion, I'm pleased with the Z10 and don't regret buying it. There's plenty of room for improvement, but I'm fairly confident that it will come. For me, at least, there's no rush.

[BlackQtCoder]

If you like remember and play with audio notes, perhaps you would like this Built for Blackberry multimedia scrapbook :
http://forums.crackberry.com/app-ann...a-book-770483/

[Rob1]

Nice review - I wonder why BB didn't release the API's to developers before the phone was released?

[kbz1960]

Nice review - I wonder why BB didn't release the API's to developers before the phone was released?

Probably because it wasn't ready.

[ubizmo]

Nice review - I wonder why BB didn't release the API's to developers before the phone was released?

This is by no means official, but what some people have said is that they want to make sure there are no security or performance issues created by headless/background apps.

Example: On BBOS, the Pandora app was always loaded on startup, even when I didn't actually open or use it. It also used a small amount of CPU time every day, just sitting there. There was no way to kill the process. I had to use a third-party app just to see it running; it didn't show up in the regular list of running apps. This was fairly harmless, since it really didn't use much CPU time--about 30 seconds a day. But there was another app, a file management app, that was seriously draining the battery even when I thought it wasn't loaded. So I'm guessing that BlackBerry wants to try to make sure that headless/background apps will be well-behaved. It seems to me that every such app would have to be individually vetted anyway, but I'm no software engineer.