New Delhi, March 8: BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has said the feedback for its high-end Z10 model is very encouraging.
"What has been a real surprise for us is that BlackBerry 10 as a platform and product is attracting users that are currently on other platforms," he had said.
Blackberry recently launched the Z10 smartphone, a first in a line of smartphones powered by the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, in 20 countries including the UK, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, India, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, among other countries. The company is also rumoured to launch Z10 in the US on March 22 with AT&T.
Heins, however, declined to give sales figures of Z10, as the company is in a quiet period ahead of the March 28 release of its fourth-quarter results.
Heins pointed out that the Z10 has surpassed sales in emerging market like India, where where cheaper entry-level devices are typically popular.
"I was surprised when we launched in India how well the Z10, which is a high-end device, sold," he said.
It is well known that BlackBerry has been on the rocks for the past year or so, and hoped that the 4G toting Z10 will start a successful revolution.
The Z10 sports a 4.2-inch 1280 x 768 display, 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage and a steep price tag of Rs 43,490 in India. The Z10 has been competing against the likes of Nokia Lumia 920, Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5.
The Z10 measures a comfortable 130 x 65.6 x 9mm (5.1 x 2.6 x 0.4 inches) and weighs 137.5g (4.85 oz), which is comparatively low as compared to Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.
The most evident change in Z10 is its departure from the physical keyboard and into the touchscreen slate form factor. Since it's meant to be a corporate phone the company tried to give it those looks by placing a large glass and sandwiching it with two plastic ends with a slightly rubberised back covering the rear. With its stealth-like aesthetics, the Z10 is sure to look good at the hand of a bat-obsessed crusader as a businessman.
With a 4.2-inch 1280x768 display, the Z10 boasts a pixel density that exceeds the iPhone 5. While it may not be able to combat the sun as well as Apple's handset, it makes up for it in sharpness.
At the top right there are volume buttons, with a button between them to start/stop music playback on a short press and activate Voice Control on a long press. On the left side are the microHDMI and microUSB ports.
The biggest selling point of the Z10 is its new BlackBerry 10 OS, which is a huge step forward with previous touchscreen BlackBerrys. The navigating is done through a series of panels, for messaging, open apps and your main app tray. For instance, the home gesture, which you take by swiping up from the bottom of the display, will take to a screen of currently-open programs, each represented by a thumbnail. Also when you switch between apps, the previously-used program stays open in a frozen state, which makes it very quick to open it again. Hence at the time of heavy usage, there is no need to go back to tha app tray to find and open an app again.
There's definitely a learning curve attached to it, but it doesn't take much time to master it.
The Z10 has an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, which is a very capable shooter, taking clear, good quality photos at a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448. In addition, the camera of Z10 offers the Time Shift mode, which captures frames milliseconds before and after the actual click. Thus you can do away with closed eyelids and half-grins. The picture quality, however, is just about average.
Under the hood, there's a decent 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, with a healthy 2GB of RAM. A teardown reveals it's a Qualcomm MSM8960 SoC, with an Adreno 225 GPU.
Connectivity options include: WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, HSPA+ (up to 21Mbps down and 5.76Mbps up), as well as NFC.
What BB10 has new to offer:
BlackBerry Hub – All your email accounts, BlackBerry Messenger, social networks, texts and call logs, are stacked together in one neat package that can be accessed from any point of the phone's usage. You can also just take a peek and close it, if you're in a hurry. Imagine the pull down notification menu in Android, only better.
BlackBerry Keyboard –The keyboard shows word options, which you can flick up to send to the text field. Also, during the usage we found that the keyboard adapted quickly and learnt a lot as we typed.
BlackBerry Messenger –The redesigned BBM takes care of all your contacts that have a BB.
BlackBerry Balance – It is good to separate your work account with your personal account. With one pull-down gesture, we could switch from Personal to Work profile (which can be password protected) and set the apps that we need to access while at work.
Overall, BlackBerry is giving us a well designed smartphone with a good full touchscreen. It has great internals, a powerful yet not the best camera, along with a good BlackBerry 10 Operating System that is good and comes bundled with good applications. It is no doubt that BlackBerry is a good start for the company to reclaim its lost sheen in the smartphoe arena, but still lots of work has to be done to ensure that they build a strong and competitive platform.
