BlackBerry Z10: Phone promised a comeback but failed

An optimistic launch

Blackberry’s Z10 smartphone failed to set the world alight. Research in Motion's BlackBerry had been the business phone in the earlier years of the 21st century, but by 2013 it had lost ground to iOS and Android. The Z10 was meant to be the device that brought the company back into contention.

At the time the z10 was launched, there was optimism, especially among former BlackBerry fans that their favourite brand was back. The phone offered many features that users liked, read more about this below. Yet it didn’t deliver the turnaround the ailing phone-maker hoped for.

Consumers chose not to buy it by the truckload. That’s hardly surprising in a choice-packed market dominated by brands carrying more 2013-smartphone cachet than Blackberry.

Respectable, but not essential

In hindsight the Z10 was not a bad phone. It just wasn't good enough. View it as the phone equivalent of the kid who you want on your side but is never among the first when captains pick teams.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Some say Blackberry didn’t do enough marketing – it hoped the brand name would carry the launch.

Another reason, certainly not the top reason, the Z10 didn’t get momentum is that many people never got a close enough look to see what the phone has to offer. It has a lot of interesting features and ticks all the important boxes.

Here's what I wrote when I first used the phone:

BlackBerry Z10 first impressions

Hardware: Physically the Blackberry Z10 hits the mark. The display is as good as any other phone. The phone feels good in your hands. The rubbery back cover makes it comfortable and easy to grip most of the time while being able to use your right-hand thumb to type. It may not suit everyone's hands, but it is not an uncomfortable reach for most people.

The Z10 is roughly the same size as Apple's iPhone 5. This means you can do most tasks using one hand and your thumb – that’s not the case on the slightly larger Samsung Galaxy S4 or the Nokia Lumia 920. The Z10 weighs a fraction more than the iPhone 5 – but you don’t notice the difference in practice.

Camera: Although the 8 megapixel specification looks good on paper, the Z10’s camera is clearly not as good as that on the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S4 or the Nokia Lumia 920.

Pictures are grainier and the Blackberry struggles when picture-taking conditions are not great. Taking pictures is easy and the quality is good enough for basic uses, you just don’t get the same crispness or clarity as elsewhere. Don't choose this phone if picture quality is important to you.

User interface: the phone’s gestures can be a struggle at first. While they seem good enough, I’m switching between phones during this test and that means having to reboot my brain each time I start using the Blackberry.

The lack of a hardware home button isn’t a problem. I miss having an obvious home screen. When you swipe the screen to open the display the phone takes you to a grid of open apps. You can easily move between them, close them and see what’s going on, but I don’t find this as good as the live tiles on the Windows Phone 8 home screen or even the messy home display on the Galaxy S4.

Some of the gestures are good. I like being able to slide up the screen to see if there are incoming messages waiting for me. I prefer this to the Android notification bar.

Keyboard: Blackberry fans expect nothing less than the best software keyboard on a screen-only smartphone. The Z10 delivers this in spades, although it takes getting used to. At the launch BlackBerry said the keyboard learns your behaviour – that’s good but I haven’t seen it yet.

And here's a more measured report after a few week's use:

Three weeks with the BlackBerry Z10

For a company most people thought was dead, BlackBerry makes a fine phone.

Blackberry’s hardware is solid. There’s a textured rubber case which feels good in the hand. The size and weight are just right and the 4.2 inch screen is big enough to read and small enough to thumb across.

Gestures control just about everything. Swipe up to light the screen. Swipe up and right to get to the BlackBerry Hub. That’s where all incoming messages and notifications collect in a single stream. Swipe right to get at the apps.

There’s no home screen. At least not in the sense you’d find on other smartphones. Instead you get a view of the recent apps. Moving between apps quickly becomes intuitive. The core apps are  integrated. It’s as if the designers thought about productivity first, leaving aside all other considerations.

BlackBerry personality

The BlackBerry 10 operating system has a distinct personality. If it was human, it would be the hyper-organised person you’d want on your team at work, but perhaps not your first choice when looking for pals to hit town with later at night. Given a choice it would wear pinstripes and seriously consider a tie.

And that’s the rub, despite BlackBerry’s marketing pitch, this is a serious business tool first and everything else second. This is not an entirely bad thing. As far as the basics are concerned, you’ll get more work done, faster than on other phones.

But it's never fun.

A couple of negatives

Battery life is disappointing compared with rival phones. I can get through nine hours without running into problems – any longer and there’s the danger of closing down. That’s not enough – few of us have the luxury of eight-hour work days and there’s commuting on top of that.

I also have trouble using the keyboard. This may not be a problem for you. While I’ve nailed all the other smartphones for quickly typing short text messages, I struggle to write much on the BlackBerry Z10 touch screen.

That’s odd because the predictive text does a great job of deciding what comes next. The problem is that swiping the predicted words into the text field is tricky.

Verdict

Overall, while the BlackBerry Z10 is not the best phone, it’s acceptable. It feels like a grown-up phone. It has better software than Android phones and a clear business focus.

If BlackBerry got this model out the door a year earlier, it could have been a world-beater. In mid-2013 it is better than adequate, but not cutting edge. Choose the Z10 only if you need a work phone. Otherwise you may be better served elsewhere.

Z10: The good stuff you may have missed

Here are some of the good things in the Blackberry Z10 you may have overlooked. Many turn up on other phones. You may even find other phones that have them all. No matter, they still make owning a Blackberry a better experience than some people would have you believe.

Micro HDMI port

There’s a standard micro USB port on the Z10 which means you can use almost any smartphone charger to top up the power. Next to it is a Micro HDMI port which can plug-in to a HD TV set.

What does this mean? You can take video footage on the phone and you can play it back on a big screen or you can store movies on the phone and play them back, say, while in a hotel room on a business trip. Blackberry executives use this feature to deliver PowerPoint-style presentations.

Removable battery

Modern smartphones are often sealed units. If the battery goes, you have to fork out for a new phone or, in theory anyway, commit to an expensive refit – that’s something people almost never do.

Blackberry’s Z10 battery is easily removable. That makes updating a dead battery simple. Better still, you can carry a spare battery if you’re heading off on a trip and don’t know if it’ll be easy to get a recharge. Spares are generic and are not expensive.

Upgradeable storage

There’s 16 GB of storage in the Blackberry Z10. That’s enough for most needs, but not a lot if you want to cart movies around – see the first section above – or if you like a large music library.

The Blackberry has a Micro SD card slot that can take up to 64 GB of additional storage – that gives a total of 80 GB. A 64GB Micro SD card costs a little over $100, so if you’re a storage fiend, you can carry more SD cards and swap them as needed.

Android apps

Blackberry’s native app store is small compared to iTunes or Google Play. There may be 100,000 apps compared with more than a million elsewhere. However, the Z10 can run Android apps.

It can’t run all Android apps and some might not work as well or look as good as they do on their home OS. Not all Android apps work as well or look as good across the entire Android spectrum. Even so, you can fill some of the gaps by using Android apps.

Neat software

Blackberry’s native app store may be lightweight compared to the giants, but the standard software bundled with the Z10 is better than you’ll get on many other phones.

One of the highlights is Documents To Go. This has been around forever – I used on a Palm Pilot. Now Blackberry owns the software. It gives you a smartphone equivalent of Microsoft Office – in fact it’s fully compatible with Office – and it works with DropBox.

Blackberry Hub

If you want a phone mainly for entertainment you should probably go elsewhere although Blackberry fans might argue otherwise. On the other hand if your main goal is to get things done, Blackberry’s Hub is a good starting place.

Hub pulls all your communications into a single, central spot. That’s handy, but to make life even easier, the Hub is never more than a gesture or two away from anything else you do on the phone.

Get a life

Blackberry Balance is the name given to a set of features which allow you to keep your work smartphone use separate from the rest of your life. At first this might sound a little oddball or cranky, in practice its great for people who might otherwise need two phones.

Balance lets your company’s tech department set up a safe partition for work use that doesn’t interact with private use. From their point of view it means you can’t copy and paste important business documents onto a Facebook page. From your point of view it means you don’t risk appearing unprofessional.