BlackBerry Z10 Review

Can BlackBerry finally make a product competitive in the current market?

Running short on time? Check out the video overview at the bottom!

7.0/10

Good Things Clean and solid hardware design BlackBerry 10 is a promising new OS Keyboard is surprisingly good Innovative ways to interact with the phone

Bad Things Third-party apps leave much to be desired New UI tricks don't always pay off Battery life is a serious concern Huge learning curve

The phone market these days is dominate by the likes of Apple and Samsung. Microsoft is getting in on a little bit of the action, but really, it's Apple and Samsung making the money.
It used to only be BlackBerry. Remember those days? To have a BlackBerry was to be cool, and vice versa. These days however, BlackBerry is virtually not existent in the US.
Today, BlackBerry announced the Z10 and the Q10. The Q10 won't be out until April, and we haven't managed to get much of a look at it. But the Z10 is coming in mid-March (in the US) and sooner in some places.
So here's our look at the BlackBerry Z10. Normally the question is: Is it worth buying? But today, the real question is: Can it beat Apple and Samsung?

Using the Phone
The Z10 has no physical buttons on it's face. There is no home button. There is no back button. Instead, everything is guided by gestures. If you handed this phone to somebody today, they would have no idea what to do with it.
While navigating the phone isn't difficult, it's not immediately apparent. Thankfully, BlackBerry gives you some tips to get you started when you turn on the phone for the first time.
The main gesture, which takes the place of the normal "home button" is a quick swipe up from the bottom of the screen. No matter where you are or what you're doing, this gesture will take you to the home screen.
The home screen is made up of the last eight apps you used, there and ready for quick access. Some of these apps, like the weather app, turn into widgets on the home screen. That is, it is active, and displays the current weather. But there's one problem with that. Since the home screen always shows your most recent eight apps, you'll have too keep opening the weather app every eight apps to get it to stay on the screen, otherwise it will be booted off by the next app. It gets really annoying. You can never get used to where things are on the home screen, because the stuff is always moving around.

Peeking at the Hub, shown on the left.

The other main gesture starts out the same, a swipe up from the bottom, and then a pause in the middle, and then a swipe to the right. This brings up your BlackBerry Hub, which is sort of like the notification center. It shows you all your new texts, emails, @tweets and other notifications, but instead of simply displaying them, it allows you to reply and take action on the notifications right from within the Hub. The system works great for texts and emails, but can be a little cumbersome with tweets and other types of notification which are more of alerts than messages.
The interface of the Hub itself can be a little confusing. Joshua Topolsky of The Verge describes it best:

Unfortunately, there's a lot about the execution that doesn't work. For instance, you can't see what kind of notifications you have waiting for you unless you peek over at your list (there are actually icons that show you what's new, but you still have to use the peek gesture to see them). Additionally, the Hub doesn't always represent your overall lists of notifications or messages — when you hear an SMS notification and go to check it out, you're greeted with whatever you were doing last, which forces you to then hit a "back" button that appears in applications, or swipe over (a gesture that works in some places, but not in others). In general, I felt like I was doing a lot of extra work to see the most recent stuff in my Hub.

So the Hub is great, but also a little clunky. I'm sure you could get used to its quirkiness after some time. It's not a huge negative, its just a little annoying feature. 
Email: BlackBerry was once known for being awesome at it. Now, BlackBerry can really mess up some of the longer email threads, if you have a lot of those. It turns all your text blue (which is weird and annoying) and doesn't collapse previous messages. So you can get lots of RE:FW:FW:FW messages and stupid stuff like that.

The design of the interface isn't bad, but it isn't exactly awe inspiring. Parts of it show great potential to look really good, and other parts are a little bland. this could all be improved in future (probably free) updates.

The Phone Itself
The phone has a very nice feeling, soft back. The back can pop off, allowing you to get at the battery, SIM card, and insert a MicroSD card. The phone us built really well and feels solid. The phone feels a lot like a beefier iPhone 5, which isn't a bad thing. It gives it a classy, yet cool look.
The phone's cameras work pretty well. They take pictures basically as good as the iPhone, one of the best phone cameras out there. The camera sometimes gets the typical "pink spot" in the middle, but this one hides it better than most phone cameras.

A huge plus for this phone is the great cell reception and call quality. It's really stunning, and makes calling people actually enjoyable, as apposed to the crap that comes across the line on other phones.

Overall, the phone is really snappy. There's a couple of places where it lags a bit, but overall, really snappy. One big problem: battery life. It simply isn't that good. Some days (starting at 8 in the morning) it's dead by 6 or 7. That's not even 12 hours.
Other days, it managed to eek out a full day, but it's really inconsistent.

Apps
Apps are a big deal, especially on a new platform. The Z10 comes with some apps built in. Like maps, clocks, and a browser, as well as Twitter and Facebook The apps are powerful, but they're not the prettiest or most useful. Deleting an email takes more motions than it should, and the maps sometimes take you to the wrong place (a search for a restaurant nearby once told me to go to a town in New Jersey.
In their app store, called BlackBerry World, BlackBerry claims over 70,000 apps, though it looks like a lot of them are crap. However, they do have some big names like Evernote, Angry Birds, and Rdio, among others. 
BlackBerry World now also offers music, movies and TV shows to buy or rent. However, there's no option to stream any of it, so you have to wait for it all to download, which could be hours for some movies on some connections.

Here's the worst part of the app store: Android developers can put their app in the World, but the app basically runs in an Android emulator, and it really sucks. The apps are slow, unresponsive. BlackBerry really needs to undo this, because while it does add apps to their store, the apps are complete crap.


Overall, the Z10 is not a bad phone, but it does have flaws. It also has strengths. If you have a BlackBerry now, you should really upgrade to this. however, it's not particularly better than the iPhone or the S3 from Samsung. Personally, I would rather have either the iPhone 5 or the S3, or even the Nexus 4 over this, but I could see the phone working great for some people.

 Learn out more about BlackBerry 10 here.