Priv impressions on the first day
OK, so I managed to get one of the Privs. I'll put it out there - and I think that it's already been said in many ways - that this is not the Blackberry one knows. Even this early out, I'm missing the straight forward and intuitive BB10 and there is a learning curve to android (although I've previously had a droid).
To start with the physical device: overall, it's slick, and it fits nicely in my hand and it's not too heavy. Coming from a Passport, it's hard not to notice the differences, but I did like the wider aspect of the Passport for some things.
The keyboard on the Priv is much smaller than the Passport, in fact, I think it's smaller than the Q10's - which should be THE standard to work from. Pressing is easier than on the Passport, and it's close to the Q10 in effort. I'm adjusting back to the smaller keyboard, but am really happy with the full keyboard as opposed to the hybrid on the Passport (I did not like having to float between the keyboard and the vbk to get things done. Touch controls on the keyboard are working flawlessly thus far. As for the vkb, I'm on the fence. I can see the advantage of Blackberry's vbk, although I think it's appearance to be substandard - unfinished. I'm not sure if I would chose this or something like Swype as the alternate (but it's nice to have ALL the alternatives). The screen is nice, bright and clear, but there's a little click near about centre of the screen when one presses it firmly. The camera is the best that Blackberry has ever had - hands down. Call clarity is crisp and of good quality. I will have to follow up on the quality of the speakers after a while as of right now I don't have enough setup to give an impression.
Conversion to the Priv: the Content Transfer was okay for the most part, but I had problems with moving email across due to certification credentials I think were on the SD card when I went to transfer it and the app expected me to go and find them. In the end, I manually added the email accounts and that was fine. All other content (tasks, notes, pictures, music, etc.) got across.
The droid OS functionality: it's adequate. Google likes to control everything, so a gmail account is necessary as the primary account. With that, there is NO option to control the content from the primary account. In my case, the majority of my contacts are in Outlook, and although I had contacts in my gmail account, I had to delete them all because android does a poor job on the phone side. All contacts show up on the phone list, regardless if there's an associated phone number or not. I've not found any way thus far to consolidate contacts like one can on BB10, but I'm not expecting to as I don't believe android has it.
Things like gestures to get to email, pinch and zoom to find unread emails, even the pull-down quick settings are missing or takes more steps to accomplish, but then again, it's android and that has to be expected. Some features that I do like is to swipe left to delete email, swipe right to set an email reminder, notifications from the top of the screen.
Being able to access all of the Google apps (by the way, the DTek is telling me I'm still in the green zone) I want without dealing with Google Play Services problems is better - no matter what is said, the dearth of apps under Blackberry is a pain.
This is about as far as I've gotten in a day. Overall impression is that I feel I can work with the Priv with some caveats, but will certainly miss BB10. If Blackberry made a BB10 version it would be a hard choice over which OS to go with. If they resolved the Google Play Services issue, I think it would be a no-brainer I would be back.
(Revised for readability - thanks for the comments on this).
