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Well, BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It’s the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It’s lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.
And here’s the shocker — it’s complete. The iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all entered life missing important features. Not this one; BlackBerry couldn’t risk building a lifeboat with leaks. So it’s all here: a well-stocked app store, a music and movie store, Mac and Windows software for loading files, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, parental controls, copy and paste, Find My Phone (with remote-control lock and erase) and on and on.
The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry’s 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone’s vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front).
The thin, sleek, black BlackBerry has 16 gigabytes of storage, plus a memory card slot for expansion. Its textured back panel pops off easily so that you can swap batteries. It will be available from all four major carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — and Verizon said it would charge $200 with a two-year contract.
Some of BlackBerry 10’s ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you. Without even pressing a physical button, you swipe up the screen; the Lock screen lifts like a drape as you slide your thumb, revealing what’s underneath. It’s fast and cool.
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The camera software is terrific. One feature, Time Shift, is mind-blowing. You take a photo of people — then, with your finger on a face, you can dial forward or backward up to two seconds in time, seeking that perfect expression. You repeat with the next face, and the next, until you’ve dialed up the perfect fraction of a second, independently, for each person in the shot. Admit it: that’s brilliant.
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The BlackBerry 10 neatly solves a huge problem for corporate techies: how to keep employees’ work phones secure in a world where people also use their phones for personal things. If a company has BlackBerry’s corporate software suite, separate worlds can be created on each phone: personal and work, with distinct calendars, address books, wallpaper and even app collections. They appear together — but without the work password, only the personal stuff is visible.
When the employee leaves the company, one stroke deletes the whole corporate or personal half.
The popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service now lets you make free phone calls and video calls over the Internet. You can even screencast — share what you’re doing on your screen with your conversation partner, like a map, an app or a photographic snap. (BlackBerry 10 required; older BlackBerry models can use BBM only for texts.)
Thanks to NFC (near-field communication), you can shoot a photo, map, Web page, app, file or song to another BlackBerry 10 owner, wirelessly, on the spot. Other phones do NFC sharing, but rarely as simply.
