Remember when everyone had a BlackBerry and BBM was the way to communicate? Back in the height of BlackBerry’s popularity, RIM’s BlackBerry devices were everywhere and reigned as the king of smartphones and emails until Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone back in 2007. That began the nail in their coffin and the devices and OS remained the same and the company failed to innovate.
Now with a new CEO pushing a completely redesigned BlackBerry brand ( hardware & software), BlackBerry wants their spot back. The Canada company took their gesture-based BlackBerry 10 OS and used it as a base for navigating throughout the new platform. And don’t worry, unlike Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10 will launch with a wide-variety of apps at launch.
The new UI RIM is using is called BlackBerry Flow where everything just flows with each other and in real time. To take your BB 10 device out of sleep mode, you simply just swipe from the bottom of the screen up a la PlayBook. You also have Active Frames on your homescreen that may resemble Live Tiles but work in a similar fashion. With BlackBerry Peek, a sleek new way to view your notifications while still staying productive in whatever app you are using. You just swipe up once you receive a notification and if you want to view more, you swipe to the left to view the message in its entirety. BlackBerry was already one of the first platforms to use the unified inbox idea but has gone and made it look impressive with BlackBerry Hub.
The Hub allows you to manage all of your conversations via BBM, email, Facebook, Twitter, texts, or LinkedIn into one central communications hub.The BlackBerry platform has been stale for a bit as many users have flocked elsewhere, myself included. Maybe because BlackBerry was my first real smartphone experience and even though I have an iPhone 5, I still miss the QWERTY keyboard perfection and the best push email on Earth. Consumers and analysts will be skeptics as RIM still has to prove it can provide a decent app ecosystem as that’s what its all about these days as Windows Phone is suffering from the same issue. RIM announced some popular apps making its way to BB 10 like along with a strong carrier support.BlackBerry is hosting a global event on January 30th unveiling the finished product and announce availability for their new devices.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEPYYo0-gfc&w=560&h=315]
Are you ready for the new BlackBerry device or has that ship already sailed?
