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RIM CEO and possible Bond villain Thorstein Heins gave the world its best look at BlackBerry 10 today; while previous demos had focused on the camera and keyboard, this morning focused on even more everyday features. It looks like it does some things very well—and that they’re not the things you’d care about.
We’d seen flow several months ago already, and it still looks like a nice! It’s basically a fancy word for multitasking, minimising your clicks and keeping you away from having to constantly navigate back to a window of app icons. What Heins didn’t address—again—is how RIM plans to keep all those apps running in the background without giving your battery a major sad.
You’ve got multiple views you can look at, both your standard day/week/month options and a People tab that gives you integrated info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn connections) of whoever your meeting is with. That last feature is being spun as perfect for last-minute business meetings, which is fair but probably a limited use-case. Unprepared business people of the world, BB10 is for you!
BlackBerry’s messaging service might just be its best feature, and it’s gotten a nice little UI update, one that includes cleaner panels and, yes, emoticons (but what about emoji?!). Heins stresses the “one thumb” navigation, which is again good for the business person on the go who has his trenta americano in a death grip.
You can also text in multiple languages with text prediction, which is a very clever feature but one that appeals to an even narrower niche. BlackBerry 10: For Tardy, Caffeinated, Polyglot Business Persons.
BB10 also allows you to live two lives on your device, a work life and a personal life. It’s essentially two siloed user profiles, and RIM has advanced the idea far enough that it even has a separate enterprise App World. It’s a way to keep sensitive corporate info safer, although (and this is a sincere point) I don’t know how much of an issue that’s been for Android and iPhone Fortune 500 users. Presumably if it had been one, well, they wouldn’t have switched?
Beyond the corporate security piece, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would actively seek out this feature who’s not a CTO. That’s the bigger problem, isn’t it? People want their work phones to also be their personal phones, but this implementation isn’t something you seek out as a consumer. It’s something you’re issued by your IT guy.
This new peek, combined with what we saw earlier this year, gives the impression of a very competent mobile operating system. But it’s also one that we’re still months and months away from, during which time more and more companies will switch on over to iPhones and Androids and, with Windows 8 synergies kicking in just next month, WP8.
And more than that, even if it were to arrive today—even if it had arrived last Autumn—BB10 seems to serve very few masters. It’s a great OS for a browbeaten, unorganised, over-caffeinated, multilingual business persons sure. But how many people does that really describe? Outside, that is, of RIM itself.
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What are they going to do with all of the unsold inventory? And how many BB10 developers have died by Thorstein’s own bare hands?
These questions need answers.
I am think “will RIM live long enough to launch BB10″ is the most pertinent question.
“BB10 Adds So Many Features That So Few People Want” and that even fewer care about.
Poor Blackberry. When the phone is failing to respond to touches properly and then the Boss is clapping and saying “wow, look at that” when it works, it is awkward to watch. On side note the vimeo video plays really badly for me. Anyone else too?
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Poor Blackberry. When the handset fails to respond to touches properly and the boss claps to his own product and says “wow, look at that” when it works it’s awkward to watch.
VBlackberry could do well If they made an Android phone, and found a way to make BBM work within it, and make it available to all Android users as an app and charge a monthly free to use it.
In my mind BlackBerry is a big Ship…called the Titanic!
starts off big and mighty then starts to sink.
Ok, not very impressive of course… But give it a bigger “keynote budget”, a few guys with jeans and black shirts, a bunch of easy impressed journalists and boom, its suddenly almost*** revolutionary!
*** ok, only almost. After all no even a apple like keynote would make RIM look great now…
The video player is crap!! keeps jumping back and freezing, or is it just this shit thing called Chrome and Windows!? not happy about that.
That integrated calendar thing sounds decent, until you realise that the only use it would really have is if you don’t know the people you’re meeting well, and if you don’t know them, how likely are you to be their facebook/linkedln friend?
To be fair, it would have been nice having a work and personal profile set up when I was using my old Nexus S for work emails. It was a huge battery drain and was a pain to turn on and off.
Its a small thing though, and BB10 just sounds like far too little, FAR too late
Oh no! You changed the last sentence! It was RIM’s own CEO, now is the whole RIM.
It’s a pity (and a bit unfair) that you have changed without notice. It was much funnier before!!!