BlackBerry 10 guide - Know Your Cell

Research In Motion gave us the clearest picture yet of its upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system?and said it is building its next-generation, mobile-computing platform around a few key things: productivity, reliability, security, multitasking and the keyboard. Let's take a look at what it showed off during its BlackBerry Jam developer event.?

RIM said it has rebuilt its operating system around simple, yet powerful gesture interfaces. It's courting developers to make third-party apps (maybe trying too hard) but the company said that the in-and-out-of-apps metaphor that's common with the iPhone and Android is somewhat out of date. Instead, RIM built BlackBerry 10 around the idea of fluid multitasking and this is evident in BlackBerry Flow and BlackBerry Hub.?

BlackBerry Flow?

BlackBerry Flow starts from the moment when you wake up the device, as you simply swipe up on the screen to wake it up. The lock screen displays things like recently-received emails or upcoming calendar appointments and you can interact with these by tapping on them.?

Flow is built around the idea of enabling users to quickly gain access to the information they need with simple gestures, and another aspect of that is called BlackBerry Peek. Let's say you're in your full-screen calendar app, by swiping up from the bottom, the calendar will become smaller and you'll be able to swipe over to your integrated messaging inbox, known as BlackBerry Hub.?

BlackBerry Hub

RIM is known as a messaging powerhouse and the BlackBerry Hub will be the place to go to keep track of your e-mails, Twitter, Facebook updates and BlackBerry Messages. The BlackBerry Hub is accessible from nearly any screen by making a specific swiping gesture (swipe to the right when you're in BlackBerry Peek). Within the hub, you can get all of the contact information including content from LinkedIn and Facebook in one central repository.?

If all the gestures seem a little confusing, you may be right. Over at CNET, they said the BlackBerry 10 operating system shows promise, but there is somewhat of a steep learning curve to understand how Flow, Hub and Peek work. In some ways, this reminds me of the ill-fated PlayBook?and its gesture-based controls.?

BBM

The new BBM continues to have that real-time communication element that people love, but it's also been revamped to look more modern and incorporate BlackBerry Flow and Hub. Thanks to what RIM is calling Active Frames, when BBM is minimized on your home screen, you'll still be able to see the most recent message. This is similar to the Live Tiles we've seen in Windows Phone.

BlackBerry Keyboard

Of course, it wouldn't be a BlackBerry without a good keyboard and RIM is very proud of the software keyboards that will be coming with BlackBerry 10. The BlackBerry 10 keyboard will automatically learn how you type and it will even be able to auto-correct in multiple languages without you having to toggle between settings. That's quite impressive.?

I know some of you out there don't care how good a software keyboard is, you just want your physical keys. You'll be happy to know that RIM is committed to bringing out a BlackBerry 10 device with a physical QWERTY keyboard in the not-too-distant future.?

BlackBerry Balance

RIM is known to be a big player in the corporate space, so it's making it easy for companies to keep their data separated from their employees' personal data on the phone. With the BlackBerry Balance feature, users will be able to tap a button and the device will swap between personal and business.?

This means you'll be able to pull up all your corporate apps and the associated data by tapping on a button and there will even be a specific corporate BlackBerry App World.?

Third-party apps

While RIM is very proud of the Flow and Hub elements of BlackBerry 10, which will let you get a lot done without having to hop into apps, it's still courting developers. We saw demonstrations from Facebook and Foursquare and these third-party apps integrate well with the core functionality of the platform.?

We also spied icons for apps from Box, Twitter and LinkedIn and you can expect a host of other consumer and enterprise apps. RIM is also laying out a $10,000 guarantee for BlackBerry 10 app makers who hit certain criteria.?

How does it stack up?

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is at least being realistic with BlackBerry 10, as he recently said that it could be the third-most used operating system behind iOS and Android. After studying the demonstration a bit more, I'm intrigued by what RIM is baking up but I'm still not convinced it can overcome the "too little, too late" syndrome.?

BlackBerry is actually still growing outside the United States and it now has more than 80 million users (most of the growth is within developing markets). BlackBerry 10 is doing some very interesting and valuable things too, but I still don't see it making much of a dent in the adoption of the iPhone 5 or the high-end Android market.?

Dethroning Windows Phone for third place is a much more achievable goal, but I still don't think it offers what Microsoft is going to have. If BlackBerry 10 was already on the market, I'd like RIM's chances a lot more but considering we won't see the inevitably immature first version until 2013, I'm not very optimistic about its chances.?

You can watch the entire demonstration from the BlackBerry Jam keynote below:

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Source: http://www.knowyourcell.com/news/1606152/blackberry_10_everything_you_need_to_know.html

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