BlackBerry Z10 review

The BlackBerry Z10 heralds the rebirth of a fallen leader in the smartphone market. It's a clean break from the past with a big touchscreen and novel OS, but the same business mentality that made it the favorite of office dwellers around the world. Except, this time BlackBerry has also added a dash of fun.

   
BlackBerry Z10 official images

BlackBerry's previous generation of touch-driven smartphones felt a lot like Nokia's early attempts to knock Symbian into shape for touchscreen. With the Z10, however, the company threw everything out and started fresh.

BlackBerry 10 that powers the phone is a modern operating system with a brand new gesture-based interface and support for powerful dual-core CPUs. If you think dual-core Krait is old news on Android, you'd be right, but the Z10 is closer to the iPhone in this regard - the OS has been optimized to run on very few devices (just one right now, one more on the way), allowing for maximum efficiency.

Then BlackBerry equipped the Z10 with a 4.2" WXGA screen - slightly bigger and sharper than the iPhone 5's retina display - but kept the package more compact than certain massive droids. Then came all the connectivity features, hardware ports and slots.

Here's what they ended up with, the good and the bad of it:

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri/quad-band UMTS/HSPA, optional 100 Mbps LTE
• 4.2" 16M-color WXGA (768 x 1280 pixels) capacitive touchscreen TFT
• Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait, 2GB RAM, Adreno 225
• BlackBerry 10 OS; advanced on-screen keyboard; Office document editor
• BlackBerry Hub with extensive social networking connectivity
• BBM with video chat and screen sharing
• 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with face detection and Time Shift; LED flash, 2MP front facing camera
• Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps; 720p recording with front-facing camera
• 16GB storage, microSD card slot; built-in Dropbox and Box integration
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot; Wi-Fi sync
• Bluetooth 4.0
• NFC
• standard microUSB port, microHDMI
• 3.5mm audio jack
• GPS receiver with A-GPS

Main disadvantages

• Brand new UI has a steep learning curve
• Occasional crashes and unstable behavior
• BlackBerry World missing key apps
• BlackBerry Maps are even worse than Apple Maps
• Camera offers little control over image quality

As with any newborn platform, there will be growing pains - sparse app market and iffy maps for one. The biggest concern is whether the sleek new interface will put people off (both current and new BB users). It's fast and intuitive once you get used to it, but doesn't have the level of familiarity of the iOS or Android (which honestly took years cultivating).

   
BlackBerry Z10 in our office • next to the iPhone 5

That's the mission ahead of the BlackBerry Z10. It can't single-handedly recapture the market and bring BlackBerry to its former RIM glory, instead it sets the stage for future devices (the Q10 is a couple of months away).

That's not to say that the Z10 won't achieve popularity - with quality hardware and software, the Z10 can easily net both people who need a BlackBerry but are tired of the aging BB OS 7 devices and new users who are equally tired of iOS and Android.

Virtual personal assistant shootout: Talk the talk ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What can I help you with? Hope your day is going well. It's a start. But it'll take time for the likes of Siri and Google Now to live up to the Intelligent Personal Assistant title. Surprisingly, intelligent isn't too far off for software that's context and location aware, does speech recognition and has an impressive backend of resources and services. Personal? Well, Google obviously knows who you are, where you are and what you've been up to lately. Yet, we'll stick to calling them virtual for now.

Assistant then is perhaps the trickiest bit. So it seems. And the question is (barring scenarios where your hands and eyes are busy with something else) whether we really need to do by voice what can be done at the click of a button - ok, a few buttons. And if it's info and content, can we not just Google it instead of having Google Now do it for us?

Anyway, things like Google Now and Siri are but a taste of what your smartphone can do for you. There's plenty of potential there and Apple and Google are hopefully looking beyond the launching of apps, personalized and localized search and voice typing. Not least because the hardware race isn't going to go on forever.

What you are experiencing isn't some sort of a strange deja vu. We had a similar comparison indeed on our blog, but it was well before Google Now and iOS 6 (and the improved version of Siri that came with it). Samsung's S Voice had just launched on the Galaxy S III but, honestly, the experience was less than perfect. It was more of a see-Apple-we-can-do-it-too kind of thing. Google Now has now taken over and is available on every single Android smartphone with Jelly Bean. Not only that, it's very much a part of Google's long-term plans.

Anyway, a few months ago we were less than impressed with the three different pieces of software. Slow to respond, and sometimes blatantly wrong, the virtual personal assistants just weren't up to scratch.

However, since users aren't best known for lowering their expectations, the software has evolved to offer new and better features. So, we're about to look beyond the big change logs and get some real action.

We are going to see what new tricks Apple's Siri, Google Now and Speaktoit have learned and how they can be of use in our everyday lives.

The tasks at hand are going to be as close to real-world scenarios as possible. A weather brief in the morning, pending appointments and other calendar events, the latest news, warning about flights being delayed and checking available seats for our movie of choice for the evening. These are all an essential part of an assistant's resume.

Apple Siri

Kicking off with Siri, the inner voice of the iDevices. It was introduced as one of the key software goodies in iOS 5, as a result of Apple's acquisition of the eponymous company. It has been refined since, including a substantial redesign to feel more "Apple".

At the very beginning (iOS 5) Siri was able to send texts, call contacts, update your Twitter, set reminders for you and even tell you whether it's going to rain or not.

Later on, Siri also developed an interest in sports, while restaurant and movie reviews came as an extra bonus to the overall experience. Since iOS 6, launching apps is also on the list of skills.

Apple is keen to make a point that Siri doesn't just understand what you say, but knows what you mean, as well. As a result, you can ask it indirect questions and it'll still be able answer it. In most cases it'll succeed, thanks to the large database of case scenarios that's being regularly updated.

In the cases when it doesn't understand what exactly you're on about, it reaches to WolframAlpha for answers to your question. If it's a restaurant recommendation you're after, then Yelp is the back office.

The thing with Siri is that it doesn't need you to speak like a robot in order for it to understand the meaning of the words coming out of your mouth. Asking it if you simply need to take an umbrella with you is enough for Apple's assistant to check the weather, see if it's going to rain in your area and generate a response based on the current information.

There's more to Siri than meets the eye, though. It's got that little bit of personality that you simply do not get with the other virtual personal assistants. For instance, Siri will be more than happy to tell you a joke or answer a cheeky question. As a side effect, making sly comments is also in her nature.

That's what separates Siri from the rest of the virtual personal assistant pack. Unlike the many alternatives out there, Siri isn't simply a tool that lets you do stuff. Given the chance, it'll try to put a smile on your face, while fulfilling its duties.

And it'll do so in a number of different languages. Naturally, there's support for English, but also German, Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese. And while the language support is sufficiently wide many of Siri's features only work in the US and Canada.

Intel Announces 4th-Gen Core “Haswell” Processor Lineup With All-Day Battery Life

At its prominent CES keynote on Monday, Intel unveiled its 4th-gen line of Core i processors processors, previously code named “Haswell”. The new processors are yet another update to its Intel Core line, this time with much-increased energy efficiency in order to power a new generation of ultrabooks.

The growth of ultrabooks has been exponential over the past few years. These devices have managed to pack the power similar to a regular laptop computer into much thinner devices. This amount of take-up from consumers has led Intel to tweak its main product line of Intel Core processors to accommodate for ultrabooks. These new processors perform better than the previous generation, yet they feature the largest improvements in energy efficiency, operating as low as 7 watts.

In a press release, Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, pointed out that this new generation of processors will underpin the growth of ultrabooks over the next year:

“The 4th generation Core processors are the first Intel chips built from the ground up with the Ultrabook in mind. We expect the tremendous advancements in lower-power Core processors, and the significant ramp of touch-based systems will lead to a significant new wave of convertible Ultrabooks and tablets that are thinner, lighter and, at the same time, have the performance required for more human-like interaction such as touch, voice and gesture controls.”

This achievement represents Intel’s largest gain in battery life, from one generation to the next, in the company’s history. For the first time, most ultrabooks underpinned by the “Haswell” architecture will sport at least 9 hours battery life, and up to 13 hours. This is quite a step up from just a few years ago, when the everyday laptop wouldn’t last more than 4 hours unplugged.

The trend of ultrabooks began just a few years ago, after the demise of the smaller and more stripped-down netbooks. ultrabooks typically feature full-sized screens, keyboards and many of the features found on traditional laptops, yet they are powered by solid-state drivers and omit certain features such as optical drives and Ethernet ports. Removing certain features greatly extends the battery life and durability of these machines, making them a good choice for everyday PC users