BlackBerry Z10 review

  Introduction

The BlackBerry Z10 heralds the rebirth of a fallen leader in the smartphone market. It's a clean break from the past with a big touchscreen and novel OS, but the same business mentality that made it the favorite of office dwellers around the world. Except, this time BlackBerry has also added a dash of fun.
BlackBerry's previous generation of touch-driven smartphones felt a lot like Nokia's early attempts to knock Symbian into shape for touchscreen. With the Z10, however, the company threw everything out and started fresh.
BlackBerry 10 that powers the phone is a modern operating system with a brand new gesture-based interface and support for powerful dual-core CPUs. If you think dual-core Krait is old news on Android, you'd be right, but the Z10 is closer to the iPhone in this regard - the OS has been optimized to run on very few devices (just one right now, one more on the way), allowing for maximum efficiency.
Then BlackBerry equipped the Z10 with a 4.2" WXGA screen - slightly bigger and sharper than the iPhone 5's retina display - but kept the package more compact than certain massive droids. Then came all the connectivity features, hardware ports and slots.
Here's what they ended up with, the good and the bad of it:
BlackBerry has bet the farm on the new QNX-based BlackBerry 10 OS and launched two handsets to spearhead its renaissance. The keyboard-equipped Q10 has yet to hit the market, but the touchscreen-only Z10 is available to buy in the UK now — from EE, O2, Vodafone, 3UK and Carphone Warehouse, among others.
 

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri/quad-band UMTS/HSPA, optional 100 Mbps LTE
• 4.2" 16M-color WXGA (768 x 1280 pixels) capacitive touchscreen TFT
• Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait, 2GB RAM, Adreno 225
• BlackBerry 10 OS; advanced on-screen keyboard; Office document editor
• BlackBerry Hub with extensive social networking connectivity
• BBM with video chat and screen sharing
• 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with face detection and Time Shift; LED flash, 2MP front facing camera
• Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps; 720p recording with front-facing camera
• 16GB storage, microSD card slot; built-in Dropbox and Box integration
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot; Wi-Fi sync
• Bluetooth 4.0
• NFC
• standard microUSB port, microHDMI
• 3.5mm audio jack
• GPS receiver with A-GPS

Main disadvantages

• Brand new UI has a steep learning curve
• Occasional crashes and unstable behavior
• BlackBerry World missing key apps
• BlackBerry Maps are even worse than Apple Maps
• Camera offers little control over image quality

As with any newborn platform, there will be growing pains - sparse app market and iffy maps for one. The biggest concern is whether the sleek new interface will put people off (both current and new BB users). It's fast and intuitive once you get used to it, but doesn't have the level of familiarity of the iOS or Android (which honestly took years cultivating).
That's the mission ahead of the BlackBerry Z10. It can't single-handedly recapture the market and bring BlackBerry to its former RIM glory, instead it sets the stage for future devices (the Q10 is a couple of months away).
That's not to say that the Z10 won't achieve popularity - with quality hardware and software, the Z10 can easily net both people who need a BlackBerry but are tired of the aging BB OS 7 devices and new users who are equally tired of iOS and Android.
So, revolution or evolution? The hardware is miles ahead of Berries of old, but you'll have to jump over to the next page to see how it stacks up against current Androids and the iPhone.

 

 

 

 

Unboxing the Z10

Our BlackBerry Z10 came in a box with two chargers - one for a European plug and one for a US plug (this could be region dependent). Also in the box are a microUSB cable and a one-piece headset.

BlackBerry Z10 360-degree spin
The BlackBerry Z10 measures 130 x 65.6 x 9 mm, which isn't too big for a smartphone with a 4.2" screen. We've seen better of course, with the Motorola Razr M/Razr i duo measuring 122.5 x 60.9 x 8.3 mm and featuring 4.3" displays. The difference in width goes down to the different screen aspect - 15:9 for the Z10 and 16:9 for the Moto phones. It seems BlackBerry could have done better with the space above and below the display. On a second thought, considering that swipes are central to the navigation and many of them start off the screen, they have an excuse.

Design

The BlackBerry Z10 is a minimalist handset. Its 4.2-inch, high-resolution (1,280-by-760-pixel/355ppi) screen extends to the full width of the chassis, and has very small top and bottom frames. There are no front buttons, and only a couple elsewhere: the on/off switch sits in the middle of the top edge, and there's a volume rocker with a central mute button on the right-hand side (pressing and holding the mute key also initiates voice control). As far as connectors are concerned, the headset slot is on the top, while the left-hand side carries a Micro-USB port and a Micro-HDMI port.
Features
The BlackBerry Z10 is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz processor supported by 2GB of RAM. That's a generous memory complement, and a feature that no doubt contributes to the phone's very smooth performance. There is 16GB of internal storage, with extra capacity available via the MicroSD card slot.
The Z10 is the first BlackBerry handset to support LTE connectivity (bands 3, 7, 8 and 20 in our review unit; other SKUs have different configurations). Tri-band HSPA+ and quad-band GPRS/EDGE are also supported. We ran our Z10 on EE's 4G (LTE) network in the UK, which uses the 1800MHz band 3.
Bluetooth (4.0 LE), Wi-Fi (dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n) and GPS are all present, along with NFC. The usual array of sensors are also included: accelerometer, compass, proximity, gyroscope and ambient light sensor.
There are two cameras: a front-facing 2-megapixel fixed-focus unit with image and video stabilisation, capable of 720p HD video; and an 8-megapixel autofocus camera capable of 1080p full-HD video. The main camera also has a flash unit, image stabilisation, a backside illuminated sensor (for enhanced low light performance), a dedicated ISP and 64MB frame buffer, and supports a clever multi-shot feature called Time Shift (of which more later).
A notable absentee from the spec sheet is an FM radio. These are by no means ubiquitous, but many handsets do offer them and we'd prefer to see one in this flagship smartphone.
BlackBerry 10 OS

The most significant thing about the BlackBerry Z10 is that it runs the new BlackBerry 10 OS, an entirely new operating system that BlackBerry hopes will revive its fortunes. The BlackBerry 10 user experience is built around three concepts — Hub, Peek and Flow — and is designed for one-handed use.

Controls

A key difference between the BlackBerry Z10 and its smartphone rivals to run the major platforms (iOS, Android and WP) is the lack of any hardware buttons at the front.
All you get below the display is the microphone pinhole, while above you'll spot the earpiece, the ambient light and proximity sensors, as well as the front-facing camera and the status LED. The LED alerts you of anything from incoming calls through BBM and regular messages, to the battery status and social network updates. You can selectively enable the events you need or disable LED notifications altogether.

An excellent 4.2" display

 

The BlackBerry Z10 offers a 4.2" display with an aspect ratio of 15:9 and WXGA resolution (1280 x 768 pixels). Those figures add up to a nicely sounding 355 ppi pixel density, which means the screen is tack sharp and you’d be hard pressed to discern individual pixels. It's not as good as the Oppo Find 5 and its 1080p 5-incher, but you'd have to be looking from way closer than feels comfortable to tell the difference.

Battery test

Update: The battery tests of the BlackBerry Z10 are complete. It scored a 46 hour endurance rating. The breakdown in the individual categories is this: 8 hours 20 minutes of 3G calling, 6 hours 27 minutes of browsing over Wi-Fi and 8 hours and 44 minutes of watching videos.
Conclusion
The BlackBerry Z10 is a nicely designed, minimalist handset with a superb touchscreen and good technical specifications that include LTE and NFC support. The new BlackBerry 10 operating system delivers a satisfying user experience once you get used to it, although in our opinion it would benefit from a physical home button.
There are some important niggles. I need to monitor four different Twitter accounts, but could only set up one on the device. Also, Google calendar and contacts can't be imported — something that needs to be fixed quickly if the Z10 is to capture consumer mindshare.
Early reports suggest that the BlackBerry Z10 is selling well, although no official figures are available yet. In the long run, however, the company's chances of maintaining market share are likely to depend on how businesses respond to the new BlackBerry 10 OS ecosystem.

source:gsmarena,google images