BlackBerry 10 OS review

The good: The BlackBerry 10 OS looks terrific, and comes with many of the world-class features you'd demand from a modern OS. It also adds a few of its own signature tools for security and business users.

The bad: Despite the grown-up look, RIM's new OS is riddled with perplexing omissions and behavioral inefficiencies that wear on you over time.

The bottom line: BlackBerry lovers who can get past the rookie mistakes will find a polished-looking OS that's packed with interesting and useful features, but happy Android and iOS users won't find a reason to switch.

New BlackBerry is entirely gesture-driven, its layout sort of resembling a handful of playing cards spread out in an overlapping row. To the far left you've got BlackBerry Hub, the universal inbox where you can see all your messages and notification alerts. To the right of that is the "Active Frame" area, a nerdy name to represent the multitasking screen that stores up to eight thumbnails of your open apps. Move right again to see your pages of app icons, which you can rearrange, delete, and plop on top of each other to create folders. You can access the dialer, universal search, and camera from every screen.
For the most part, you'll use the usual swipes up, down, left, and right, though there are two special moves to know. First, you can swipe up from bottom of the screen to wake the phone (you can use the lock screen buttons as well). Second, there's the "Peek" gesture, where you quickly pull your finger up and to the right, as if tracing a perfect right angle. This temporarily suspends your app so you can glance at your notifications in the Hub. Lift up and you close the app and jump to the Hub. Keep your finger pressed to the screen, and you can return to the app without losing your place. I like Peek.

Basic smartphone features
As with all of today's mobile operating systems, BlackBerry 10 supports multiple e-mail addresses, calendars, and social-networking accounts.
There's support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, mobile hot spot, VPN, and Internet tethering. You'll find airplane mode, DLNA sharing, and accessibility features, including a magnification gesture, hearing aid support, and settings for TTY for teletypewriters.

Voice Control
To say that voice assistants have caught on is an understatement. BlackBerry 10's new Voice Control app places its usual commands within the context of a voice assistant that talks back to you. Sure, it looks like a 'Berry-ized version of Apple's Siri, but like most Siri knockoffs it responds to precise commands, rather than to Siri's conversational language. For instance, you can command Voice Control to open the weather app or search the Internet for weather information, but you can't ask it what the weather will be like, or if you'll need an umbrella.

BlackBerry Messenger
Another of RIM's longtime strong suits, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) sends peer-to-peer messages, photos, voice notes, contact information, and files between BlackBerry users for free. In BlackBerry 10, the app blossoms, adding voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing to its beloved emoticons and group messaging.

Camera and video
A camera lens can lead to poor or stellar photos, but the software plays a role, too. In BlackBerry 10, you have a few modes and scenes. There are the usual camera and video modes, and there's also TimeShift, which takes multiple shots along a timeline. Right after the photo snaps, you can rewind along the timeline to save the best "moment." This is best for photos of groups, dogs, and subjects that aren't adept at staying still.
I like the idea of TimeShift, but the fact that you can't activate it from the regular camera mode means you have to plan ahead when you want to use it.
So what are the camera's other scenes? You've got burst mode and stabilization (which automatically launches when you turn on the video camera,) but there's no built-in HDR or panorama. You will, however, find scenes tuned for capturing action, night scenes, the beach, and whiteboards. You can turn on flash, and choose a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio.

WRF