BlackBerry Z10 a great retort to touchscreen competition – in 2008

BlackBerry has done with the Z10 in 2013 what it should have done in 2008, after Apple released the iPhone and rewrote the rules of the smartphone industry. This review of the Z10 comes six years later than it should have, and perhaps four years too late to matter. But as BlackBerry ramps up promotion of the new device in a last ditch effort to keep the company relevant, the Z10 is a surprisingly competent piece of hardware. Where has this phone been all these years? If BlackBerry is capable of this kind of modern looking kind of touchscreen hardware now, it could have released a product like this years ago. In reality the Z10 is an admission on BlackBerry’s part that the iPhone-slash-Android model of smartphone is now inevitably the future, with tiny physical keyboards and small screens which only take up half the front face of th device now a thing of the past.

That stubbornness cost BlackBerry a shot at the marketshare which Android collectively ended up with, the opportunity to be the yin to the iPhone’s yang. But with that ship sailed, the Z10 is a solid hardware product. Its true touchscreen is scores better than the failed Storm which came before it, with its hardcover screen which had to be physically clicked to enact the equivalent of a screen touch. The specs on the Z10 are good enough, close enough in range of the iPhone 5 or Galaxy S3 that users won’t have to sweat being shut out of mobile computing power. As much as the Z10 hardware is nothing special, it’s also nothing approaching a liability.
However, the Z10 falls down in a manner which should not have come entirely as a surprise: the BlackBerry 10 operating system is still very much 1.0, with the kind of early interface rough edges the iPhone suffered from back in 2007 and more. More trouble comes on the app front. With relatively few native BlackBerry 100 apps available thus far, Z10 users are being pointed to the Android app store. That turns out to be about as tenuous as it sounds, with various Android apps running on the Z10 in varying levels of acceptability and compatibility. And while the iPhone gets away with not having a back button because its apps are all designed not to need the use of one, running Android apps on z back button-less Z10 is sometimes far from practical.