Time to switch? Blackberry 10 is dead... long live BlackBerry 10!
I've been reading so much about how bb10 is dead that I thought it was time I checked out some alternatives. So, as I wanted a 10" tablet as my eyes are struggling with 8" ones, I bought a Teclast X98 Pro Dual Boot Android 5 / Win 10 - 9.7" tablet. I know it's not a phone, but I felt it would give me a reasonable insight into how Android and Windows would work for me in place of my Z30.
I set up both systems how I wanted them fairly easily and started to play with them. I liked the apps on Android (but there's an awful lot of crap) and felt the apps on W10 were sometimes very good but often poor. I couldn't get Endomondo to run at all, my weather crashes occasionally as does Ebay and the way some apps crammed text into the centre of the screen and left huge borders either side really defeated the object of having a large tablet. I've really struggled with the keyboard on both systems and correcting spelling mistakes in W10 - click on the word try to move the cursor and in the end give up and just delete the word and retype it. Maybe that's just me, but I've missed the way bb10 does it big time. Apps on Android run well mainly but do crash occasionally. The tablet feels more sluggish on Android and extremely snappy on W10. The browser war was one by Edge and in the end I wasn't bothered about lack of apps as I just used the browser which I really really liked.
I'd set my Android screen up with widgets and my W10 with live tiles and by the end of the week had removed all the widgets and most of my live tiles. I found them distracting and they lured me into clicking on things I didn't need to and wasting time.
After two weeks, despite Androids great App selection I now just use W10. It's (for me) far quicker, more professional and quite slick. It's also really not finished. There are loads of areas that seem to not be working properly or sensibly. Spell correction as I mentioned, my wifi sometimes won't work and you need to reboot, you have to remember to tell the OS that a new wifi connection is metered rather than it prompting you for each new connection, my tablet is limited to 3 medium tiles across (portrait) when it could easily fit 5 and I don't see why MS doesn't let me have the number of tiles I want. I hate scrolling down all the time. Onedrive can't be loaded to a SD card - really MS? You think most people's tablet can load all their onedrive stuff to the internal drive? That drove me mad. No global inbox - even for just your emails? Very annoying.
But I can see it improving and improving with each new patch update etc. It feels like it has potential and is going somewhere, whereas Android felt slow, old and unreliable. (These are my thoughts only!) I did like the drag down notification tray on Android and it's customisation and of course all the apps.
But W10 has the desktop too - which is very useful for me and much easier to use on my tablet than 8.1 was on my old tablet. It seemed odd and quite impressive that MS could get a full blown windows to run more snappily than a tablet OS In Android.
But what about the Priv? Well it's a great phone, but I really don't want a PKB and I'm not sure I want Android much either and I'm really not keen on spending that much money on a phone. So a W10 Phone is it then? Err, not yet. My conclusion is that I like W10 on the tablet but having played around with both OS on the tablet (which I know aren't the same as the systems on a phone) I'm not in any hurry to say goodbye to my Z30 now, so, as you were, I'm staying put and will perhaps have another look at Android and W10 next year...
Posted via CB10