BlackBerry Z10 review

It’s only a smartphone, but much rests on the BlackBerry Z10’s slim shoulders. It’s the first phone to sport the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 smartphone OS, and carries with it all the hopes of a once-great technology company. With BlackBerry’s (formerly RIM) share price and sales on the slide, the Z10 needs to make a big impact if it’s to have any hope of turning the firm’s fortunes around.

As such, it’s perhaps appropriate the new phone bears more than a passing resemblance to the most successful smartphone around. From the profile of the rounded corners to the flat, chopped-off edges, the Z10 looks like the iPhone 5’s big brother. If it’s a sibling, though, it’s certainly the uglier one, with a textured, cheap-feeling, soft-touch plastic rear and thicker 9.1mm waistline proving entirely less alluring than the iPhone’s aluminium frame.

Still, we do appreciate the minimalist design – the volume rocker on the right-hand side and power button on the top edge are the only physical controls – and the 4.2in, 768 x 1,280 display strikes just the right balance between screen real estate and pocketability.

The Z10 is nothing if not practical, though. Lever off the back of the Z10 and you’ll discover a replaceable, 1,800mAh battery and a microSD slot, ready to expand the existing 16GB of internal storage. And there’s little else missing from the list of specifications: it has both front and rear-facing 8-megapixel and 2-megapixel cameras capable of capturing 1080p and 720p video respectively; there’s Bluetooth 4, NFC and dual-band Wi-Fi covering the wireless side of things, plus 4G compatibility.

Performance

On paper, the Z10’s core specification looks competitive, too, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus processor backed up by 2GB of RAM – right up there with the best on the market. And the first time you fire up the Z10 the signs are good. Slide a thumb from right to left to access the app drawer, take a peek at your messages, swipe through an inbox or two and all is well. Web pages in the browser respond smoothly to pinch, pan and scroll gestures, and even streaming HD material via YouTube plays smoothly.

Start to dig a little deeper, fire up a few apps and leave them running, however, and things look less rosy, with animations and transitions from screen to screen juddering frequently. Demanding 3D games were occasionally reduced to a sluggish crawl: Wipeout-clone Ragged Edge started dropping frames madly as soon as the action started to heat up.

Running the SunSpider browser benchmark revealed that the browser isn’t the quickest either. It completed the tests in an average time of 1,902ms, which is slower than both the iPhone 5 (932ms) and Samsung Galaxy S III (1,430ms).

The display is altogether more impressive. Here, the benchmark is the iPhone 5, which reaches an eye-searing 582cd/m2 at its highest setting; the Z10 outstrips it. Indeed, we measured it at a frankly astonishing 715cd/m2 – the brightest phone screen we’ve come across by quite some distance.

Now, we should point out there’s no way to disable the auto-brightness setting, so the BlackBerry Z10 only reaches this high brightness under direct and full sunlight. The rest of the time it hovers somewhere around 300cd/m2 to 400cd/m2 in office conditions, which is still perfectly acceptable. You can also turn the brightness down manually, should you so wish.

You might think that would help battery life, but when we came to testing this aspect of the Z10’s performance, we were underwhelmed. The phone has a 1,800mAh capacity rechargeable lithium-ion unit under the plastic rear cover, which gave 60% remaining on the gauge after 24 hours in which we carried out a number of tasks, designed to simulate a light workload (a 50MB download, an hour of screen-on time, an hour of audio playback and a 30-minute phone call, with a single Gmail account syncing for the rest of the time). That’s about average for a modern smartphone in this test – better than the Samung Galaxy S III and Nokia Lumia 920; level with the iPhone 5; and behind the Razr Maxx and Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Camera

The camera is passable. In low light, photos exhibited much more noise than the same scene snapped on an iPhone 5. We found autofocus unreliable, and ended up with a lot of soft, blurry images after a few days using the phone. On the other hand, in better lighting, and when you do manage to get the focus bang on, the results look perfectly acceptable – well exposed, with natural colours and a decent amount of detail.

There are some fun features to play around with in the camera app, the best of which is the Time Shift feature. Switch this mode on, and the camera will snap a sequence of shots, after which it allows you to choose a frame using a slider to scrub back and forth through the sequence.

There’s also a selection of filters that can be applied to both stills and video, while the Story Maker app lets you put together a quick video montage of clips and photos, complete with backing music and titles. It’s all wholesome fun, although you don’t get a great deal of control.

BlackBerry 10 gestures and front-end

The hardware, then, is a mix of the good and the bad; the software it’s running is a very much more consistent affair. In fact, considering this has been built from the ground up, it feels remarkably mature. It isn’t the features, though, nor the look of the interface that grabs the attention first – it’s how BlackBerry has implemented the touchscreen gestures.

Like the PlayBook, and also Windows 8, the Z10 makes extensive use of edge-swipes to access key features. With the phone in standby, you can swipe up to unlock the phone. From the lockscreen, a swipe down from the top edge puts the phone into bedside mode. A single swipe from the bottom of the screen in any app takes you back to a multitasking view, where you can switch apps, dismiss them with a tap, or swipe right to left to access the app-launcher view.

Finally, and most usefully of all, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen in any app to take a quick peek at your messages and then, if you wish, keep your finger on the screen and swipe right to access the BlackBerry Hub.

The BlackBerry Hub

These gestures sound simple, but they make the BlackBerry Z10 feel different to use than the average smartphone, and once we’d got the hang of them they felt just right. It’s also nice, for once, to have a phone that puts messaging at the heart of the OS.

The Hub is always a gesture away, whatever you happen to be doing, whether that’s using the up-then-right swipe, or a simple left-right swipe from the multitasking view. And once you’ve brought it up, the Hub works extremely efficiently as a place for gathering all of your communications together.

The default view displays all your messages in one stream, from SMS, BBM, email, Twitter and Facebook messages to calls and even phone notifications (downloads, app installations and so on). If all that’s too much, you can quickly narrow it down: a swipe in from the left edge of the screen brings up a list of options, allowing quick filtering by message type.

You can search through and compose any message type from here, too, although note that Facebook and Twitter messages are restricted to notifications and mentions. Just as well, as we could envisage it quickly becoming swamped.

Phone calls, texting and BBM

As a messaging phone the BlackBerry Z10 is the very model of efficiency, then, and this is carried across to the phone, texting, and message composition features. As with the Hub, you can quickly access the phone app from anywhere; all it takes is a swipe to get you back to the multitasking screen, and a single tap. The phone button is always there, in the bottom-left corner.

This phone app works largely as expected. To make a call, simply dial the number on the keypad or select a contact from your list. Surprisingly, it won’t suggest numbers as you type, and it won’t type a name out using the number keys (as you can on an HTC phone). However, the contact search is very quick indeed; you can also forgo the phone app entirely, by using the universal search function. Hit the search key on the multitasking screen, and contact matches appear up top, just below app matches. It’s then possible to initiate calls or texts with a single tap.

Call quality is exemplary – voices came through crystal clear at both ends in testing – and there’s even a note-taking tool on the in-call screen for jotting stuff down as you go. As has become customary, text messaging is threaded, and it’s comparatively simple to forward messages and copy and paste between apps.

A couple of key new features have been added to BBM, so it’s now possible to not only have text conversations and make voice calls, but also to initiate video calls and share your screen. The latter two features work best over a decent Wi-Fi connection, as over our 3G connection images looked smeary and unpleasant.

The keyboard, however, is the most important aspect of the Z10’s messaging element. It’s what BlackBerry made most fuss over at the launch, and it’s certainly very different to anything we’ve tried before. The layout is standard, but it’s the way word suggestions and predictions are delivered that’s most unusual.

Instead of appearing along the top of the keyboard, word suggestions appear just above the next letter the phone thinks you’re going to type. Thus, while typing the word “special”, after the first three characters have been entered, a number of choices pop up above the keyboard: “speed” above the letter “e”, “speak” above the letter “a”, “special” above the letter “c”, and “Spencer” above the letter “n” (odd, but perhaps a match to a name in our address book); to add the intended word, a simple swipe up on the “c” is all that’s required.

It goes further than predicting words based on mere letter patterns, too, examining the surrounding words and sentence structure, refining its suggestions accordingly. Thus, when typing stock phrases, such as “I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you”, it’s possible to complete the sentence with surprisingly few taps and swipes. In this case, it took only 11 gestures to complete a 38-character phrase.

Alas, there are problems. The first is the font for the suggestions themselves: it’s far too small and subtly coloured. You might not even notice the suggestions are there at first, and we imagine some wearers of glasses may have difficulty reading them. We can’t imagine how the BlackBerry developers looked at this and didn’t think it would be a problem.

The second is that, to keep scanning for these suggestions, your eyes have to be in far too many places at once: as with other word-prediction systems, you have to look at the keyboard when typing, glancing up to make sure you’ve typed the letter correctly; here, however, you also have to keep scanning between the keys. In some situations we found this actually slowed typing down instead of speeding it up.

It is possible to change the settings so that suggestions only appear above the keyboard, but at this point words become irritatingly fiddly to swipe up. Another fault is the letters on the keys themselves don’t change case as you hit the Shift key. At least there’s no typing lag.

BlackBerry Balance

BlackBerry also made great play of BlackBerry Balance at launch, a feature that allows you to effectively split the Z10 in two, with your IT department controlling one half, and personal content on the other. This isn’t new – our Real World Computing columnist, Paul Ockenden, wrote about it first in November 2011, when it appeared on the BlackBerry 9900 – but it’s certainly useful, allowing IT departments to prevent potentially unsafe apps from accessing data in the corporate part. It allows IT departments to remote-wipe only the corporate data and apps, without affecting the rest of the device. This is a boon for smoothing over some of the bother involved in BYOD.

Apps and other content

The big question when any new platform touches down, however, is “how good are the apps?”. It would be unfair to expect iOS and Android levels of comprehensiveness, but a count of 70,000+ at launch is promising. It’s certainly much more positive than Windows Phone was at launch, and it isn’t too hard to track down entertaining games and useful apps to purchase and install.

We were pleased to see BBC iPlayer, TuneIn Radio, Flixster, Angry Birds Star Wars and World of Goo all ready and waiting for installation, and there are plenty of big names on the list of firms BlackBerry says are “committed” to developing for the platform. These include (but aren’t limited to) eBay, Amazon (Kindle app), Skype and Spotify. Hopefully, it won’t take too long for these to materialise in the BlackBerry World app store, but even without them it’s a good effort from BlackBerry.

There’s also a solid selection of apps pre-loaded, with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare, calculator and compass apps, plus Documents To Go for creating and editing office documents. The maps app comes complete with turn-by-turn voice instructions for driving, but it isn’t the slickest, and oddly has no walking mode.

Verdict

Aside from some performance niggles, then, the new wave of BlackBerry smartphones looks to have got off to a flying start with the BlackBerry Z10. For a new smartphone on a first-generation platform it feels remarkably mature, with an exceptionally usable and well-thought-out interface that aims to provide something different to the competition – and largely succeeds.

There’s a decent selection of apps in the BlackBerry World store, and more big-name titles on the way. The screen is exceptional and the camera, traditionally a weakness of BlackBerry handsets, isn’t that bad at all. Even pricing isn’t overly avaricious: £30-£40 per month for a free phone is pretty much par for the course for a flagship phone these days.

The BlackBerry Z10 marks a confident, and encouraging return to for BlackBerry in its bid to catch up with Android, iOS and Windows Phone. It isn’t quite good enough to compete for overall honours just yet, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	Free
Contract monthly charge	£31
Contract period	24 months
Physical
Dimensions	66 x 9.3 x 130mm (WDH)
Weight	136g
Touchscreen	yes
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	1.95GB
Camera megapixel rating	8.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	4.2in
Resolution	768 x 1280
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Other