The Review......
Blackberry Z10 REVIEW
The good, the bad & the ugly...........
Well folks I have been promising this review for the past couple of days and now I am at a stage where I can at least proffer an opinion on the handset, and cover some of what I have found to be good, the bits that are bad and the areas which are sadly just 'ugly'....
HARDWARE
The Z10 is an attractive phone for the most part. The matte plastic shell does a good job of hiding finger print and the soft plastic back indeed makes the phone rest easy in the palm of your hand. The phone sits comfortably between the iPhone 5 and the HTC One size wise.
There are couple of low points to the hardware design that sully the design however, namely that is the rear plastic cover which unlike the S4 back panel which is of similar construction, the S4 fits firmly and has no flex, whereas on the Z10 there is a touch of flex, as if the back isn't quite fitting properly. This means it doesn't feel quite as sturdy as it should and those that find the plastic case of the S4 to feel or look cheap, will find the Z10 much more disturbing in this regard.
The second low point hardware wise is the screen, whilst the 1280x768 resolution 4.3 screen offer good color reproduction, decent viewing angles and 350ppi resulting in crisp clear text, the problem is that the screen has a tendency to attract finger grease. Those familiar with the Xperia Z have seen this on that device, the Z10 is likewise as attractive to smudges. This is exacerbated by the fact that everything is based on gesture so of course you are swiping your finger gesture wise resulting in more smudging.
I'd recommend putting a SGP Ultra Crystal screen protector, they offer far better oleo-phobic coating to reduce finger prints.
Battery wise it ships with a 1800mAh battery, and whilst only offer a dual core snapdragon processor, that 1800mAh struggles to keep up with the phone in comparison to the 2300mAh battery in the flagship Android handsets (S4 / One).
The 8mp camera on the rear produces some decent results, I'll cover that later. The volume buttons and play/pause button are great, and the fact you can assign the volume buttons to act as forward and back for the music player is a great tweak.
SOFTWARE
BB OS 10.1
My Z10 comes with the current up to date software albeit with a small supplemental update when first setting up the device - Blackberry OS 10.2 is due out in a few months and may rectify a numbers of the bigger issues I have with the phone software wise, but it would be unfair to ignore this fact, but to make excuses as it is too. So I am basing this opinion on what is on my device NOW.
Stock Software, now my device came with no carrier bloat ware which is very impressive and welcome, but this may also be partially attributed to the fact that carriers just don't have dedicated software for BB OS 10.
Initial setup of the device guides you through selecting carrier if you have a sim inserted, connecting to your wifi network, updating OS software if an update is available, setting up BB iD and the setup of your email, twitter, linked in, Facebook accounts. PUSH is supported on .mac / .me email accounts alongside GMAIL support for contacts / calendar alongside email.
All good so far, with one caveat. Selecting what the phone will actually notify you about on each of these accounts is not available. Its all or nothing especially with Facebook. This can result in a lot of useless notifications.
Once our accounts are added we are ready to go....
Upon initially waking the device, swipe gesture from the blackberry logo upwards, you are presented with a basic iOS home screen layout. You can indeed hold down on an icon and arrange things into new pages or drag on top of each other to create folders. All of this is common within smartphones so whilst not revolutionary it is nice.
Interestingly whilst there is a text message app shortcut / icon there is no email app shortcuts. They are all consistently there in the blackberry HUB however. But it is strange that it gives a text message app icon as this is basically embedded into your hub anyway.
The stock apps are solid with decent clean UI elements. There isn't an awful amount of extras - its a case of WYSIWYG and for most part that's not a problem. Calendar, Music Player & Video Player, Weather, Calculator, Remember (a notes application that syncs with Evernote), clock, camera, BBM, search and voice search are all decent stock applications. Adobe Reader is pre-installed as it Docs to Go for reading your word / excel and PowerPoint documents on the go. Yes NONE of this is especially exciting, but they all do their respective jobs well. There is a an application that is basically a mobile shortcut to Dropbox, and your usual Social applications Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and ForeSquare.
Small application highlights.
CAMERA
Camera software is simple, but elegantly put together. There is strangely no tap to focus however (coming with 10.2) doing so just results in the user taking a picture which takes some getting used to. Basically you have to allow a second or so before taking a photo to allow the camera to focus, for the most part it does an excellent job. There are no major over exposure issues, and the HDR setting is as good as the one on the iPhone 5 and tats very good.
When looking back at your photos you have the choice of editing them and the editing features are generally some of the best baked into an OS. The Instagram like filters are decent enough, but the auto enhance, saturation etc.. adjustments are all very good and all do a speedy and excellent job of touching up your photos on the fly.
Those familiar with HTC Zoe's will be pleased to hear about Storybook. Basically imagine HTC Zoe's share feature BB style, so you choose your pictures, the music track and a selection of templates very similar to ZOE and the phone assembles them, adds titling and then saves the resulting video. You can then save and share this video. Better still it allows you to output these at HD res too.
http://youtu.be/3V7QSdPxeGA
LIVE TILES / WIDGETS
A genuinely really nice feature is the minimised applications that are still actively running turn themselves into widgets. So your weather application becomes a weather widget, the picture library becomes an active little slide show, clock displays a nice digital or analogue widget, music app shows currently playing song etc, calendar displays your appointments that day.. This is a really nice feature and well implemented.
BLUETOOTH
I paired by Sony SBH20 NFC BT headset to the device without issue, but I ave detected a little audio jitters when listening to music through the Bluetooth headset. Micro jitters / interruptions to the audio.
Call quality through Bluetooth headset has been perfect however, so I suspect these jitters in music playback are a software bug / issue.
AS A PHONE
Call quality is very good and reception is generally excellent. In areas where there are black spots of coverage the phone managed to stay connected, so far no drop calls.
Others have said voice calls sound clear and crisp. So no complaints as far as a 'phone' is concerned.
BB-HUB
The blackberry hub is excellent. I love being able to access my emails, text messages and other notifications in one centralised area. Being able to post updates, reply to emails, messages and twitter without having to launch separate applications is great.
BROWSER IS EXCELLENT
The web browser on the BB Z10 has been a very pleasant surprise. Its remarkably accomplished and superior in both speed and rendering to chrome on Android, stock browsers on S4 & HTC One and even Safari on the iPhone.
Web pages load and render very quickly, giving even desktop safari on my mac a run for its money speed wise.
Flash is supported if you need it, but HTML 5 content all seems to work excellently so far. Very impressed with it, and genuinely a pleasant surprise.
Apple & Google should both take note....
KEYBOARD
I find the keyboard to be a mixed bag. Generally I'm very impressed. I like the spacing and layout and find typing on it to be very accurate. The auto correct is generally spot on. The swipe up for quick filling out of words is very strange and takes me longer to do than just type out the message with auto correct. But overall its certainly one of the best on screen keyboards.
AND NOW THE NOT SO GOOD
Incomplete 'apps'...
The social media applications are actually not supplied by their respective company but by blackberry which means whilst they superficially appear similar to Android and iOS counterparts they are missing features. Twitter doesn't have direct messaging, Facebook settings result in having to go to mobile website.
App World
Blackberry App World is pitiful. Seriously the app selection is appalling. There is no discernible way of telling if an application is a badly ported android app or built for BB OS10. There is just such an empty fathom of applications most smartphone users will be accustomed too.
There is no YouTube, Tumbler, Vine, Netflix, Google Maps, Currents, Pulse, Engadget, The Verge, Instagram, TV services (BBC iPlayer, Sky News, 4OD etc.) Flipboard, Spotify, Tapatalk...
Its a barren wasteland of the major apps ..
BATTERY
1800 mAh battery struggles. Considering my HTC One has my RSS reader running n the background along side all the other myriad of apps I utilise each day, a quad core CPU and bigger higher resolution screen - I normally end my day with at least half my battery remaining. The Z10 battery only 'just' lasts me a day. Considering I'm using it less (as there are less applications) this is not great. Whereas I would have no qualms going away and forgetting my charger for the day / night with my One, the Z10 would be flatter than a pancake.
Charging is thankfully quite speedy though.
GENERAL PERFORMANCE
A hard category really as for most part the phone is fine performance wise, however open a badly optimised app or an android app and you will get some stuttery performance. Add that to my incident of an update sending the z10 into a security wipe, the fact the phone still takes about 2 minutes to boot up there are certainly plenty of room for Blackberry to improve upon. The Blackberry software seems to run without issue it s as soon as a third party is introduced things get ropey, and as Blackberry are the ones approving of third party software - they have to take some of the blame allowing such utter ***** onto App world and users devices.
BAD STUFF & GENERAL CONCLUSION
So I'm left at the moment with a phone with decent stock apps but feck all else on the phone? Now 10.2 is supposed to offer support for Android 4.2 framework meaning we may get better apps appear on the store and from reports general performance and battery life has improved.
But with such lack of support currently on the App Store and battery life wise being hit and miss could I honestly recommend the Z10 as a 'flagship' smartphone.
Sadly no. Specs wise they are actually mid range by android standards , and with far wider software support on Android and IOS I couldn't advise someone to take out a two year contract on the Z10 or pop down 600 on a device - sim free given the stiff competition out there.
Free on contract or at 300 contract free the Z10 would be about right, but commanding flagship money for what tends to feel like an 'incomplete' smartphone experience is hard to recommend.
The camera is the best blackberry have put into a phone, the hub is great..... Live tile widgets are arguably better than Windows Phones live tiles and feel better utilisation than some of Android widgets, and the really good on screen keyboard - these are high points , but they don't mask an incomplete smartphone experience.
___________________________________
Few camera snaps...
