BlackBerry 10 might not have one killer feature, other than its flagship BBM service, but it does have plenty of new and inventive features that can change the way we use smartphones. Instead of being just another smartphone, BlackBerry’s new OS offers users a brand new experience. Here are five factors that stand out in BlackBerry 10.
1. Hub and Peek
What task do you perform most frequently on your smartphone? Chances are it involves checking email and other messages. While there are plenty of apps and other useful features on every smartphone, messaging remains the core functionality. The problem with the current crop of smartphones is that you have to check many different apps to find all of your messages. Even your email might live in multiple locations.
BlackBerry’s messaging feature, BlackBerry Hub, consolidates all of your messages into a single place. When you open it up you’ll see email from all addresses, instant messages, BBM, social media updates, and more. You can remove any number of these from Hub, and you can separate them into groups. When you check your messages, you have everything right there in front of you.
The Peek option only adds to Hub. No matter what app you’re viewing, you can swipe from the left side of the screen to peek into Hub. Again, this reinforces messaging at the core of the smartphone experience. The gesture-based Peek stands about above Android and iPhone for quick messages checking and task switching.
2. BlackBerry Balance
For a while now BlackBerry has tried to separate business from personal, since they serve primarily business customers. They released BlackBerry Balance in the past, but with their declining sales it didn’t go over as well as it otherwise might have. Now that they’ve unveiled BlackBerry 10, though, BlackBerry balance comes back into play — in a big way.
The nature of Balance is simple. On a work phone you have all of your work applications and messages, and chances are you also have personal information there. Given the power of modern smartphones, most people don’t need to carry around two. Companies have realized this and have started letting employees use their work phones for personal purposes. But functionality can get muddled.
Balance keeps the two entities separate. Your personal apps don’t access information from your enterprise apps, and vice versa. It does all this while maintaining the highest level of security, so companies need not fret. It also makes employees happy, since they can get the benefit of both personal and work phones in a single device.
3. BBM and screen sharing
When people think of BlackBerry, they typically associate it with BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, the company’s killer messaging app. Plenty of people stuck with BlackBerry through everything, because they couldn’t conceive of leaving BBM. Knowing that their customers love it so much, BlackBerry has greatly upgraded BBM for BlackBerry 10.
With faster cellular networks — the BlackBerry Z10 runs on 4G LTE — users can perform more functions with their phones. Video calling has been a big feature, with Apple’s Facetime, Skype, and Google Talk leading the way. BlackBerry added a killer video chat feature to BBM, along with voice chat. This supplements the already excellent instant messaging service, which includes features such as file transfer.
One interesting part the built onto BBM is the ability to share your screen with other BBM users. This can be used for any number of purposes, including troubleshooting. Other platforms offer this in a roundabout way, but BlackBerry 10 makes it easier than everyone else.
4. Active Frames
The Active Frames feature of BlackBerry 10 helps it stand out from the crowd. The icon-based navigation system has been around for over a decade — a navigation system that BlackBerry itself helped pioneer. But it’s time to move on. BlackBerry takes a step in the right direction with its Active Frames home screen.
When you go to your home screen, you’ll see the last eight applications you’ve had open. This isn’t just the app tile, though, but a live preview of what’s running in the app. Most native BB10 apps, such as calendar and App World, have Active Frames already running. As more and more third parties create Active Frames for their apps, it will only get better.
5. The keyboard
In the past six years people have grown used to typing on a virtual touchscreen keyboard. It proved difficult at first, and in that regard BlackBerry maintained a competitive advantage. Not only did its devices continue employing physical keyboards, but they were also the best in the business. Later BlackBerry made attempts, with the Storm and Torch models, to create a virtual keyboard, but it wasn’t much better than the competition.
BlackBerry 10 changes that completely. The first thing you notice when using BB10, in fact, is the responsiveness and accuracy of the virtual keyboard. It’s almost as though you have the traditional BlackBerry keyboard overlaid on the touchscreen. The default keyboard on the BlackBerry Z10 shines. It shows that BlackBerry continues to understand the importance of the keyboard on a smartphone.
That not enough? The Q10 is due out later this spring, and it will have the traditional QWERTY keyboard. We don’t see many of those devices these days.
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