RIM's forthcoming BlackBerry Z10 smartphone, complete with the BlackBerry 10 operating system, has been demoed on video
A German tech site has been fortunate enough to get hands-on time with the forthcoming BlackBerry Z10, showcasing the phone’s form factor and some of the new platform features.
The video narration is, of course, in German, so it’s difficult to follow exactly what’s going on at all stages, but at least as a visual guide it's an interesting bit of footage.
The thing which immediately struck us about the Z10 is how small it is, it looks rather a lot like the iPhone 5 in terms of scale and leaks suggest it will have a 4-inch display. Next to the narrator’s hands it’s looking a bit diminutive to say the least.
The next thing we see is the swipe to wake up and unlock functionality, which looks fairly nifty but at the same time is a bit odd when you consider most users will want to get some kind of secure lock on there as fast as possible. Will it still function with a passcode? Time will tell.
You can also see the outstanding notifications icons on the lock screen, indicating what you’ll be able to access via the BlackBerry Hub.
In the main screen we can see small windowed previews of Twitter, Facebook, DropBox and the BlackBerry web browser – this section is scrollable and another page of preview windows comes into view.
Tapping on a window brings it up as a full-screen app while swiping upwards minimises it, but we’re also shown that you can quickly access the BlackBerry Hub, where all your notifications and messages live, from any app at any time by interrupting this upwards swipe with a sideways swipe.
Something we haven’t seen before is the Android-style swipe-down quick settings menu.
The rest of it we’ve seen before, but still it’s the first time we’ve seen BlackBerry 10 running on a production model rather than a developer handset and being handled uninhibitedly by non-BlackBerry personnel.
It’s all looking quite slick and intuitive.
RIM is poised to launch the new platform along with at least two handsets, one of which is the Z10, on January 30.
by via Know Your Mobile
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