I have had this new BlackBerry Z10 for ten days now. My first impressions are that the Z10 is far superior to the last BlackBerry I had (the Torch). I still miss the Android I had with the slide-out full keyboard (with separate number row!), but I am getting used to the touchscreen-only keyboard.
But I have some major problems with it.
1) I can’t label my Gmail. That’s kind of a major thing for me. I organize them by client and flag them “ToDo” with labels.
2) When I send an email to myself for any reason with Gmail, it doesn’t ever let me mark them as read. Even if I open the item and manually click “Mark Read”. So I permanently have an unread messages counter on my Gmail.
3) I can’t upload to specific Facebook albums. I don’t want to put everything in “Mobile Uploads” forever. With the Torch, and I suspect most other phones on the planet, you can pick an existing album (eg. “Food” or “Drink” or “Look What’s Growing in my Yard Now”).
4) There is no docking station for it (yet). I use my phone as my alarm, and for the Torch I had a dock to just drop it into, and it would go into bedside mode automatically, and act just like an alarm clock. Oh yeah, and charge at the same time.
5) The Hub is stupid. Seriously, how is “swipe, swipe, tap” better than just “tap” to get to what you want? As far as I can tell, I can’t even have icons for my work email or gmail accounts on the home screen. Facebook, texts, calendar, BBM all have icons on the home screen… but don’t use them to access your new items, because that doesn’t clear the alerts from the Hub notifications (at least, not in any timely fashion).
6) Why the heck can we still not have different LED colours for notifications? That little LED that always blinks red is perfectly capable of blinking in any other colour. On the Torch, I had an app called Color ID that would let you do this. But it is not really supported on the Z10: you have to keep the app running in its window all the time or it won’t work. Maybe full support for this sort of thing is coming in the future. But I won’t hold my breath.
There are a lot of other minor things that I could pick on and say “Android does it better” about, but I’m trying not to be biased.
And don’t get me wrong, it really is a nice device. Browsing and most other tasks seem much faster, because the Z10 doesn’t run on Java, and it has appropriate hardware to support its applications.
But for some of the things above, it seems like a downgrade. Everything above was available on older models of BlackBerry, so why take these obviously good features away? Especially when they are all simple things to implement.
Anyway, I’m stuck with it, so I’ll just have to hope that some of these things get improved in future OS updates.
I actually like the hub + peak feature. most of the flow of the phone I am on board for. There are a few things I hope they fix, and wish they did.
1) put Q10 battery in the Z10 come on! I am charging my z10 mid afternoon.
2) Search in IMAP past 30 days.
3) IMAP tasks support
4) Multiple IMAP calendar support under 1 username
5) Multiple Twitter accounts (ie company, personal)
Hey Brent! I get two whole days out of my battery. Did you do the OS update? It seemed to help battery life a lot. Maybe you have a rogue app. Speaking of which, how do I see what’s using my CPU or battery? I could do this on the Torch, too.
I am getting used to the Hub, just leaving it on the Hub most of the time to save swipes. It would still be better if this thing just had one button on it for the Hub instead of all the swiping.
I also wish for multiple calendar support with the ActiveSync. As far as I can tell I can only sync my personal calendar, and not any shared ones (ie our IT Division’s calendar).