An imperfect ten: the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone review

In many ways, I'm maybe a bit unqualified to write a review of new BlackBerry hardware. I've never owned a BlackBerry device, and have only poked at a few over my years as an IT person—iPhone and Android handsets tended to be more popular even among the professional set. I have a passing familiarity with the Bolds and Curves that compose the company-formerly-known-as-RIM's pre-BlackBerry 10 product line, but my time as a smartphone owner began after the sun had set on the BlackBerry empire.

This means, however, that I'm looking at the BlackBerry Z10 and its accompanying operating system with the same eyes as many smartphone purchasers will be seeing the phone: to us, it's a new touchscreen-driven platform that goes up against two huge, entrenched competitors (and one scrappy contender with deep pockets). It's not good enough for the Z10 to be the best BlackBerry phone ever—it also has to defeat phones from the companies that have all but pushed BlackBerry out of a market it helped to pioneer.

The BlackBerry Z10 serves as a modern-day reboot for the company, and the phone's success or failure will likely dictate whether this is the beginning of a comeback or the end of the line. Where does it succeed, and where are its version 1.0 problems?

Body and build quality

For a company that has never really made a phone like this before, the actual hardware itself pretty much nails it. At this point, the modern smartphone's form factor is "a rectangle with a screen on front" in the same way that a laptop is "a screen with a keyboard attached," but BlackBerry has gone and made themselves a pretty nice rectangle.

The body of the phone is made of a solid black (or white) plastic. This is plastic construction done right—it's not too bulky (as is the Nokia Lumia 920), but it doesn't feel too light or "cheap" either (as some have said of Samsung's Galaxy S III). The phone has rounded corners and a (very) gently rounded back that feel good to hold. The back cover, which peels off to expose the phone's SIM card tray, microSD card slot, and removable 1800 mAh battery, is made of a lightly textured rubberized black plastic that provides a nice grip, again standing in contrast to the glossy, slick plastic and glass backs used by many other smartphones.

The Z10's size also contributes to how good it feels to hold—if, like me, you find the iPhone 5 to be a bit too thin but also find the Nexus 4 or the Samsung Galaxy S III to be a little too large for comfort (at least for sustained one-handed use), the Z10 finds a great middle ground. It's slightly larger than an iPhone 5 in every dimension: 5.12" tall, 2.58" wide, and 0.35" thick (compared to 4.87" by 2.31" by 0.30"). This also makes it a bit heavier (4.78 ounces compared to 3.95 ounces) compared to Apple's latest phone, but it's still very comfortable to hold and to carry.

The soft rubberized back cover is broken only by an understated silver BlackBerry logo and the opening for the camera and LED flash.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

A microUSB port and micoHDMI port can be found on the left edge of the phone.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The volume rocker and play/pause/voice control button are on the right edge.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The power/sleep button and headphone jack on the top edge.

There's a speaker on the bottom of the phone—insert your fingernail here to pry off the phone's back cover.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Z10's many accessories: a case, power adapter, micro USB cable, headphones, and a screen cleaning cloth that says BlackBerry Playbook on it.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The phone also takes a step back from the trend toward larger and larger screens that defines the Android side of the fence at the moment—it's got an excellent 4.2-inch 1280x768 IPS four-point touchscreen, larger than the iPhone's 4.0 inches but smaller than the approaching-and-exceeding five-inch displays of phones like the Nexus 4 and the Galaxy Note II. The display is bright and colorful, and the 356 ppi pixel density makes text and images crisp and clear.

Game of phones: the iPhone 5, Z10, and Samsung Galaxy S III.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Z10 is a bit larger in every dimension than the iPhone 5.

Sound quality from the single speaker on the bottom of the phone is about as good as you'd expect—it gets reasonably loud but it's definitely tinny. Call quality is neither exceptionally poor nor exceptionally good—I called Reviews Editor Florence Ion on both her office phone and her cell phone, and she told me I sounded like I was on a cell phone. That should tell you about all you need to know.

The keyboard

The Z10's predictive typing and accuracy are probably its two best virtues.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

After spending some time with the phone as a daily driver, I can say without hesitation that the keyboard is my favorite thing about the platform. I suspect that there's quite a bit of overlap between the BlackBerry faithful and the physical phone keyboard holdouts, and in the Z10 BlackBerry has done an admirable job of making a software keyboard that physical keyboard adherents won't hate.

The first thing to like is its accuracy—even on larger phones like the Nexus 4 or Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the best I have been able to do with any given Android keyboard is to get used to its quirks, and while I generally have less trouble with the iOS keyboard, the keys are still small and I end up relying heavily on autocorrect to set my mistakes straight. The most common approach to predictive typing—giving a list of suggestions that float above the software keyboard, as in Android 4.1 and 4.2 keyboards—also leaves something to be desired, since it requires you to interrupt your normal typing flow to check out the words, pick one, and move your thumb up from its normal position to tap it.

The Z10's predictive typing isn't perfect but unlike other implementations of the idea, I've actually come to enjoy it and use it regularly. As you type, small word suggestions appear over top of the keys. It makes general suggestions for conjunctions and such when you're between words, but it will continue to make suggestions as you progress through words: typing a W, for instance, could make "where" appear over the H key, "would" appear over the O key, "water" appear over the A key, and so on. Flick upward from the key you want to make the words appear.

These words can be a bit hard to read depending on how quickly you type, and it's not always a sure thing that the word you want will appear anywhere on the screen as you type (though the keyboard will adapt to your typing patterns as you use it). I still dig the implementation, though, mostly because the way the suggestions appear doesn't require me to divert my thumbs from their normal course. Whether I want to type "where" out in full or auto-complete the word halfway through, my finger is still going for that "e" key, and I can quickly and easily move on to the next letter or word from there.

Being part of BlackBerry 10, the new keyboard would feel out of place if it didn't make use of a bunch of gestures—swipe from right to left to delete your last-entered word, and swipe down to cycle between the standard keyboard and the keyboard with numbers and symbols (both of which can also be accessed with buttons, for the swipe-averse). Polyglots will also appreciate the ability to choose up to three default languages for the typing suggestions—begin tapping out words in any of those languages, and the typing predictions will automatically begin offering you suggestions in the current language.

Emoji lovers: BlackBerry 10 has them...

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

...but they sadly render as gibberish on other emoji-enabled platforms.

Credit: Casey Johnston

There are a few odd areas where the keyboard deviates from the standard touch keyboard experience for no real good reason—tapping the Shift key, for example, doesn't transform the characters on the keys from capital to lowercase or vice versa. This emulates the experience of using a physical keyboard a bit too literally, ignoring the inherent flexibility of soft keyboards. Engaging the caps lock is also different from how it's done on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone—you press and hold the Shift key rather than double tapping it, so prepare to unlearn that behavior if you make the switch from any other platform.

It also lacks some niceties that people coming over from other platforms might miss—Swype-like gesture typing is probably the most prominent example. However, it's an easy software keyboard to get used to, and it's got plenty of ideas that other platforms would do well to emulate.

Camera

The Z10's camera and LED flash.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The eight megapixel webcam is a solid point-and-shoot. Ars Associate Writer Casey Johnston already took it for a spin in her hands-on with the phone, and found that while it generally did a pretty good job, its shots were a bit fuzzy and lacked detail compared to her iPhone 4S. We busted out an iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S III to get some further comparisons, and what we found mostly backed up her conclusions.

The iPhone 5 indoors.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Z10 inside.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Galaxy S III inside.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In this picture of my colorful desktop doodads, the three phones have to deal with less-than-ideal indoor lighting, and I tried to capture a corner of my desktop's monitor in the shot to see how they handled its (much brighter) light. The iPhone probably gets the clearest picture here (zoom in to see the detail on the phone's buttons), and while the colors are a bit saturated, they're generally accurate. The Z10's shot is both a bit fuzzier and a bit darker (though the colors are still fine); the Galaxy S III does a better job with the light, but things looked comparatively washed out.

The iPhone 5 outdoors.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Z10 outside.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Galaxy S III outside.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Go outdoors, and the lighting differences between the three basically disappear. If you zoom in on some of the bricks especially, though, you'll find that the iPhone again does the best job with color and detail; the Z10 does well with color but loses detail, and the S III loses a little of both. Zoomed out (as they appear inline here, and as you'd probably see them on Facebook or where ever they'd actually be posted), the performance of all three is basically fine in good light—the Z10 isn't exceptionally good, but it's a perfectly serviceable point and shoot.

BlackBerry 10, in brief

Typically, we like to do separate reviews of hardware and software. We do this for a couple reasons—if you just want to read about the features in Android 4.2, for example, maybe you don't want to dig through the reviews of the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 to get to that information. Also, if we're doing reviews of the iPhone 5, fifth-generation iPod touch, and iPad mini, it frees us up to spend most of those reviews talking about the hardware itself and not rehashing the major features of iOS 6.

We're following that approach here, but our in-depth look at the BlackBerry 10 OS itself is still in the works. Because using the OS is such a major part of using this phone, though, I'll try to hit all of the high points here, focusing mainly on the UI navigation, and some of the default apps and services that come with the phone.

UI performance and OS navigation

Android, iOS, and Windows Phone all use at least one button to aid navigation, whether it's a physical or a software button. This primary button, usually called the Home button, serves as an anchor for the user: no matter where they are in the operating system or what app they have open, pushing that button brings them back to the familiar home screen, which is generally designed as a sort of hub to help you get around.

BlackBerry 10 uses many established smartphone conventions, but it does away with this one: there's no button. Navigating through the operating system is accomplished entirely by swiping the touchscreen using a variety of gestures. A "home" gesture more-or-less replaces the functionality of the home button in other phones—swiping up from the bottom of the phone will wake it up, unlock it, and return you to a grid of your last eight most recently used apps. If you swipe up from the bottom of the screen while using an app, it will be minimized into this grid.

The homescreen also shows your eight mostly recently used apps (four at a time, obviously).

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Swiping down from the top of the screen usually exposes the current app's settings and options, if it has any.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This grid of apps serves as the operating system's multitasking application switcher, but apps that support it can also take on a widget-like quality when minimized. The calendar app, for example, will show you a list of that day's appointments when minimized. By default, most apps usually just present a shrunk-down (but usually readable) thumbnail of whatever you were last looking at within the app.

From this screen, swiping from right to left will begin paging through a four-by-four grid of application icons that works more or less as it does in iOS and Android: tap an app to open it, tap and hold an app to enable dragging apps around and, for third-party applications, to delete them from the phone. Dragging one app's icon on top of another will create a folder and place those apps inside. You can also tap the small squares toward the bottom of the screen to jump around between app screens as well as the multitasking screen and the BlackBerry Hub (which can also be accessed by swiping from left to right at the multitasking screen—more on the Hub in a moment).

Across the bottom of the BlackBerry 10 home screen are three soft buttons: one to open the phone app, one to open the camera app, and one to access the unified search feature. The search is quick and powerful—type in a word, and the phone will quickly filter through local storage and all of your connected accounts for the keywords you've specified. Searching for someone's name, for example, will bring up their phone number, their Facebook profile, any texts or e-mails you've received from them, and so on (you can also search for apps and files, as well as extend your search through the Maps app or your search engine of choice).

The BlackBerry Hub

The Hub gathers all of your messages and notifications into one big unified inbox-like construct.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If you think of the BlackBerry Hub as the operating system's notification center, you'll be close, but it's really more like a unified inbox that doesn't just do e-mail. It's designed around e-mail and communication—functions long considered to be BlackBerry's core competences. The Hub aggregates texts, BlackBerry Messages (BBMs), e-mails, notifications from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and reminders and alerts into a single place where you can see all of them at once. It works well if (as so many of us do) you end up hopping between e-mail, Twitter, and texts to talk with people through the day, though it's not perfect.

For one, if you're used to notification centers as they exist in iOS and Android and you prefer being able to get rid of notifications when you've dealt with them, the Hub might drive you a little crazy. Reading an e-mail or a text will mark it as read and subtract from your unread messages count, but the message will continue to sit there even once it's been dealt with. That's why the unified inbox comparison is really more apt than the notification center comparison—if you can get used to treating every text, Tweet, and Facebook interaction the same way you treat your e-mail, you'll be fine. Otherwise, the Hub can quickly begin to feel a bit cluttered, especially if you deal with a heavy volume of messages in any given day.

You can choose to deal with one account at a time if the Hub is too busy for you.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If you want to cut through the noise, swipe from left to right again when in the Hub screen and you'll see a list of all of your configured accounts, which will let you deal with them one at a time. Finally, if you're in an app (or, really, anywhere in the operating system that isn't the Hub), if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen and then leave your finger on the screen instead of lifting it up, you'll invoke something called Peek that tells you how many unread e-mails, texts, Tweets, and other messages are waiting for you in the Hub. If you see that you've received a message you want to respond to, move your finger to the right to jump into the Hub; if not, move it back down to the bottom of the screen to resume what you were doing.

As we mentioned, we'll be diving a bit deeper into some of this in the software review, but the number of services that BlackBerry 10 can connect to right out of the box is impressive: Exchange accounts; Gmail, Yahoo!, and most of the major webmail providers; Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare; the BlackBerry Messenger service; Evernote; and cloud storage services like Box and Dropbox. You may be able to connect to everything you use without even needing to dive into the BlackBerry World app store (which is good, because despite the trumpeted 70,000 applications, it's pretty bleak in there at the moment—big names like Netflix and Spotify are missing in action, and good luck if you're trying to find your favorite running or banking app from Android or iOS).

A nice gesture?

The BlackBerry 10 UI performs admirably, with only a few stuttery spots ruining the generally responsive and buttery-smooth animations (turning on the screen magnification option in the Accessibility settings is one; scrolling through the settings screen itself is another). However, the shortcoming of an operating system that relies as heavily on gestures as BlackBerry 10 does is that these gestures aren't particularly discoverable, and you're going to need to sit through all of the tutorial videos before you really know how to do everything.

BlackBerry's premise with BlackBerry 10 is that you should be able to do everything in the operating system with just your thumb, and while that's technically true that doesn't mean it's the best way to navigate a mobile operating system. Let's take deleting an e-mail as an example: you need to press and hold the e-mail, move your thumb only to the menu that slides in from the right side of the screen, and then slide your thumb down to the bottom-right corner to delete. You can also do this with a series of (three!) taps. Other platforms can delete e-mails with just a swipe or a tap of an already-visible trash can icon—it's just an example of how the operating system's gestures sometimes get in the way when they should be helping.

Internals and performance

We ran this performance comparison a few days ago and we'll recap the results briefly here. The Z10 would have been a high-end smartphone eight or twelve months ago, but these days the specs are what would be considered midrange: a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC with an Adreno 225 GPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage that can be expanded via the microSD card slot under the back cover. Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi are also part of the package.

Generally speaking, this hardware keeps the Z10's UI running nice and smoothly, with only very occasional stuttering, but we generally like to try to quantify performance when we can. As we mentioned in our performance comparison earlier this week, benchmarking tools like Geekbench and GLBenchmark simply aren't available for download on new or less-popular software platforms. Instead, we'll use an Android phone with tech specs very similar to the Z10: Samsung's Galaxy S III uses an identical dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC (part number MSM8960).

By using the S III as a stand-in for the Z10 in common benchmarks, we can approximate the Z10's performance. The comparison won't be perfect, but it does let us draw some general conclusions about the Z10 that we'll be able to verify as soon as our usual benchmarks are available. Primate Labs, the creator of the Geekbench tool we use, has already reached out to tell us they're working on a BlackBerry 10-compatible version of the benchmark. Accept these stand-in scores for now, and we'll publish updates using numbers running on the actual platform as we can.

In GeekBench, our S III stand-in placed right where we expected—roughly in the middle of the pack.

For graphics, it's tempting to draw too many conclusions from the data. Realistically, what we can gather from this is that if the Adreno GPU performs as well in the Z10 as it does in the S III, then the phone will have good 3D performance. The smoothness of the UI obviously means that the GPU is well-utilized, and its benchmark performance in other phones shows that it's a solid performer. It will likely be outclassed by the GPU in Apple's A6, not to mention the 300-series Adrenos in newer Qualcomm chips, but so are most things right now.

Browser performance

For the browser tests, we hit three common Javascript benchmarks with the Z10's built-in browser, then tried the same benchmarks on the S III with the stock Android browser and also with Chrome. Since browser performance is so central to a smartphone owner's typical daily usage pattern, comparing the Z10 to its near-twin S III shows how well BlackBerry rates against close competition.

SunSpider performance isn't terrible, but in the newer Google Octane and Mozilla Kraken tests it doesn't fare nearly as well—the Kraken speed in particular is some 33 percent slower than either S III browser. Hopefully, BlackBerry will work on refining the browser's JavaScript performance as the platform matures.

As we noted in our performance preview:

Our biggest concern with the BlackBerry Z10's performance isn't that it's bad, but that it's being sold against better-specced phones at roughly the same price point. Microsoft hasn't been able to move many Windows Phone 8 units despite packing the same kind of chips into $99 phones, and a projected $149 or $199 price (with contract) for the Z10 is only going to discourage new buyers. The Galaxy S III is in the same boat now, but it's a major phone with established software from a big player, and the odds are good that we'll learn something about its follow-up at Mobile World Congress next month.

After spending more time with the BlackBerry, the subjective performance is certainly good. The UI, as I've said several times now, is liquid-smooth and rarely hiccups. For more objective numbers, though, we'll have to wait a bit longer.

Battery life

The Z10's back peels off to reveal a SIM card slot, microSD card slot, and removable 1800mAh battery.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

As we've mentioned, the Z10 features a removable 1800mAh battery—BlackBerry says you should be able to expect about ten hours of 3G talk time, 60 hours of listening to audio, and 11 hours of watching video. In mixed usage—browsing the Web, watching videos, and generally playing with the UI for our review, we ended up getting eight hours and 22 minutes out of the battery with the screen brightness set to 50 percent. This compares pretty favorably to the eight hours and 42 minutes we got out of the iPhone 5 under similar conditions and the seven-and-a-half hours we got out of the Galaxy S III.

Conclusions

The Z10 is a promising start, but that's all it is right now.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I'm neither a BlackBerry fan nor a BlackBerry hater. In general, I do want to see a strong third-place competitor take hold and really put the screws to Android and iOS, since there are still plenty of things that those platforms do badly. The question is, does the Z10 (and, by extension, BlackBerry 10) fill that role?

I suppose I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic, and that caution and optimism are at about a 70/30 split. Yes, the Z10 does a number of things well, and from a hardware perspective it's usually at least average (though again, BlackBerry is charging too much for its hardware compared to the competition). However, it's coming late to the touchscreen smartphone party. Its previous efforts to produce this type of phone led to the BlackBerry Storm, which ultimately failed. The entirely new design of both the hardware and software here mean it's starting from basically nothing in the app store department, and Microsoft's continued app-related deficiencies with Windows Phone don't bode well for the other players in the smartphone market's minor leagues. BlackBerry (the company) has been in a downward slide for a while now in terms of both marketshare and mindshare, and those are both difficult holes to climb out of.

The Z10's gesture-based UI also isn't the most discoverable or easy-to-learn, and there are things about it that make it difficult to switch to if you're used to another phone—iOS, Android, and (to a lesser extent) Windows Phone all share some common conventions. The home buttons, the basic operations of their software keyboards, and iOS and Android's swipe-from-the-top notification centers all make it easy enough to hop from one to the other and still mostly understand what you're doing. BlackBerry 10 speaks the same basic language of app icons and notifications, but moves things around just enough that someone playing with a demo unit in a store is probably going to be put off.

The Z10's main crime is that it doesn't really do anything that other phones on the market aren't already doing. It does some of those things exceptionally well—the Hub's general implementation is sound, its multitasking implementation is good, and the keyboard is stellar—but they're not so much better that they're worth giving up the ecosystems you're already embedded in if you've owned a competing smartphone for a year or two. If BlackBerry can take the Z10 (and Q10) and iterate quickly and competently on the software, if they can work with developers to get more big names in the app store, and if they can lower the price (or offer another handset aimed at those $100 and free-with-contract customers)—if they can do all those things, then the game is afoot. Otherwise, I hope that Apple, Google, and Microsoft learn from the Z10 so we can get its best features in a phone people will want to use as a daily driver.