Review BlackBerry Z10 (AT&T)

The BlackBerry Z10 is a thoroughly modern smartphone with a thoroughly modern mobile OS. I've been using it for about a week, and can say it's competitive with the latest offerings from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. But is it competitive enough? The first new OS from BlackBerry (no longer known as RIM) in years offers better video support than Windows Phone 8, better messaging than Android, and more elegant graphics than Apple's iOS. It's secure and manageable for businesses, and it'll be available on all four major U.S. carriers. But its app library so far lacks some of the major brands you expect on iOS and Android, which will make it difficult for existing smartphone owners to make the jump.


The BlackBerry Z10, meanwhile, is attractive and well built, but doesn't set itself dramatically apart from other leading slab-style smartphones. It's another nice black slab. We've seen a lot of these, and its physical design is so understated that it tends to fade into the background. I'd have been more profoundly moved if the first BlackBerry 10 phone was the BlackBerry Q10, with one of the spectacular hardware keyboards BlackBerry is famous for. There are no flagship smartphones with full QWERTY keyboards any more, despite the fact that physical keys are still much easier to type on than virtual keyboards.
An important note: This isn't a rated review. I want to wait until the phone's U.S. availability date to cement my opinion on the phone's software stability and BlackBerry's app store before I assign a star rating. At the moment, that's looking like sometime in March.

Hardware and Keyboard
The BlackBerry Z10 is a medium size, rounded black slab. Although it's a high-quality build all around, it's got a generic look. The phone is mostly very high-quality plastic with a rubbery finish on the back and smooth black polycarbonate bumpers on the top and bottom. At 5.1 by 2.6 by .35 inches (HWD) and 4.8 ounces, it fits right into the middle of popular smartphone sizes, just a bit bigger than the Apple iPhone 5


As with most slab-style phones, the front is dominated by the 4.2-inch 1,280-by-768 LCD. At 356 pixels per inch, the display is higher density than both the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III $189.99 at Amazon Wireless, although it isn't the highest-density screen around. (That's the HTC Droid DNA, at 443 ppi.) There's a Power button on the top, volume rockers with a hardware Mute button on one side, and MicroUSB and MicroHDMI ports on the other. Turn on the Z10 on and you'll see a sharp LCD with rich blacks, but not stunning brightness.
Peel off the NFC-enabled back panel to find a long, narrow 1800mAh battery and a MicroSD card slot that supports up to 64GB cards without a problem. The 8-megapixel camera lens sits on the back left corner.
BlackBerry is very proud of its software keyboard, calling it the best in the business, but every time I used it, I was wishing I had a BlackBerry Bold. The innovation here is to space the four rows of keys further apart vertically than typical for more accurate typing, along with a very aggressive autocorrect system that learns from your common word sequences. Possible autocorrects and shortcuts float above individual keys as you type. The keyboard takes up less screen real estate than Windows Phone and some Android keyboards, and the keys are nice and wide. I found it more accurate than the iOS keyboard and about on par with Windows Phone. But make no mistake, it's still a software keyboard, and longtime BlackBerry fans will miss their clicky, tactile buttons.
OS and Performance
The Z10 runs the brand-new BlackBerry OS 10, which bears no resemblance to the BB operating system of old; it's much more like the OS on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The company says 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps will be available when the phone launches in the U.S., so while the device is incompatible with apps for older phones, BlackBerry has done a solid job of building up a launch library for the new platform.
The key idea in BlackBerry OS 10 is "flow." There's no system-wide Back button; you're always moving forward. The BB10 experience pivots around a page of your eight most recently used, minimized apps, called the Active Frame. Swipe left to go to the BlackBerry Hub, or the universal inbox; swipe right to view a very iPhone-like set of app icon pages. If you're doing something and you want to do something else, you swipe up, minimizing your app, to return to the central screen where it's easy to jump into another app.
Swipe, flip, swipe: Just like with the good old Palm WebOS, you work up a real rhythm here. BlackBerry OS 10 isn't customizable like Android or Windows Phone, but to some extent it customizes itself: Those eight most recently used apps can update their pages as new information comes in, potentially making them a little like Android's widgets or Windows Phone's Live Tiles. You can't move them around, though: They're just the most recent ones you've used.
For a much deeper dive into BlackBerry 10, including third-party apps, check out our full preview.
Built around a 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm processor and 2GB of RAM, The Z10 doesn't have any performance problems even with large, heavy apps like Bard's Tale or, say, playing 1080p videos on a larger screen via an HDMI cable. The Z10 notched a 2,452 on Browsermark (which measures general browser performance) and 2198.4ms on Sunspider (which measures Javascript performance.) Browsermark results were on par with dual-core Android 4.0 phones like the HTC One SV, while the Sunspider results were slightly slower than competing Android phones, but not so much that you'd notice in typical use.
Call Quality, Networking, and Battery
You'd expect a BlackBerry to excel in the voice department, and in this case you'd be right. In my tests, the X10's earpiece delivered round, warm voice tones at moderate to high volume. The speakerphone was downright excellent—unusually clear and loud enough for most any situation. Transmissions from both a noisy street scene and a loud Starbucks blanked out the background noise very well. A call from the speakerphone let through a little bit of background noise, but the voice was fully forward and very well rounded. The Z10 had no problem connecting to a Plantronics Voyager Legend headset for voice, music, video, and voice dialing.
Voice dictation is everywhere—it's built into the OS—and it's moderately accurate, but not perfect. You can dictate about 24 seconds at a time, spelling out punctuation. Errors I encountered included "BlackBerry can" for "BlackBerry 10" and "Sasha see can" for "Sascha Segan." That puts voice control accuracy at around Windows Phone's level and below Android's.
Our test Z10 runs on AT&T's LTE network, but there will be BlackBerry Z10s on each of the four major U.S. carriers. The phone also supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, along with GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, and NFC. You can send files to another BlackBerry via NFC, as well as read NFC tags.
LTE usage saps the Z10's battery. I was able in to get 10 hours and 54 minutes of voice calling, which locks the phone into 3G mode, and 10 hours, 15 minutes of local video playback before the battery died. Both good results. But I only saw 3 hours and 34 minutes of YouTube streaming over LTE, which is quite poor. Hopefully this is something else that will be tweaked in the final firmware. The 1800mAh battery also fills up very quickly. I was able to move from almost no charge to 100 percent in three hours.
Reviewed by Sascha Segan in pcmag.com
Review BlackBerry Z10 (AT&T)