Review: BlackBerry Z10

The new Z10 could save BlackBerry.

It won't dethrone Android or put a major dent in Apple's iPhone dominance. But it will make current BlackBerry users happy enough to lay down some cash. They've been waiting for a good shot in the arm for too long, and with its modern operating system and rich app platform, this is a very capable device that will exceed their expectations. It's a phone that's meant to do much more than just send secure e-mail. For the beleaguered Canadian company that's catching up to the rest of the smartphone market, that's the good news. But even with a whole new operating system running on some great hardware, the Z10 will not inspire a grand exodus from the two leading mobile ecosystems.

No matter how much it looks like an iPhone 5, as soon as you pick it up, you know it's a BlackBerry. The user interface is totally redesigned, but there's nothing groundbreaking about it, even if the higher-ups BlackBerry would have you believe the opposite is true – since the device was first unveiled, the marketing suits have been eagerly showing off the awesomeness of the new software as they repeatedly mention the fact that 100,000 apps will be available by the time the phone goes on sale in the United States this weekend.

Let's take a look at the UI. The crowning glory of the new BlackBerry is the Hub. A repository for all your incoming messages, the Hub is meant to be a one-stop shop for notifications. The entire experience is smartly built to be controlled with one thumb, so you can tap around while holding the phone in one hand. You can access it with one thumb, too. Swiping up and to the right from anywhere in the phone will open this notification supercenter.

I added my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and e-mail accounts to the Hub, and it did exactly what it should do: place all of my various notifications into a single, easy-to-navigate area. "Good job, BlackBerry," I thought – until I wanted to fine-tune those notifications. It throws everything in there no matter what. Get 50 replies to a Tweet? They all end up in there, burying any other notifications.

With a few flicks, you can go directly to any account. But, for the Hub to be truly a useful catch-all notification center, it needs an account-by-account granular setting to cut down on clutter. You can remove accounts from the Hub without removing access to those items in the Hub area, but such an all-or-nothing solution isn't ideal. This information overload is something truly connected users battle everyday.

Even more central to the new UI than the Hub is the screen that displays all of the apps you currently have open in a vertically-scrolling, two-column grid. You end up here a lot. If you want to navigate from the Hub to your home screens where you've neatly organized your apps or your folders, you have to swipe past that two-column list of open apps first. It gets tiresome. This is a huge misstep, considering it's so easy to get into the Hub from anywhere on the phone.

Once you do get past the open apps page and arrive at your home screens (the traditional pages filled with tiny app icons any smartphone user would immediately recognize), you can quickly switch between them. Jump to any home page by tapping on the square at the bottom of the screen that corresponds with that page. So, instead of swiping five times to get to your fifth home screen, just tap the fifth little box in the line of boxes at the bottom. It's quick, intuitive and exactly like the TouchWhiz Android skin on Samsung phones.

Small aggravations aside, the UI is intuitive enough that anyone new to it (which is actually everyone) will feel at home within a few minutes. It's smooth, quick and mostly does what you would expect it to. But it takes more than a fancy interface to woo the masses. You need an ecosystem.

BlackBerry knows it needs to catch up here. The game has changed since the company's heyday. It's all about the apps now. And you need two tiers of apps – the freebies to draw new users in, and the premium apps to keep your developers paid and happy.

BlackBerry has been trying to kickstart app development by hosting big developer events and offering financial incentives to those coding for the platform. This has lead to an impressive amount of activity around BlackBerry 10 development. BlackBerry announced Thursday, one day ahead of the launch, that it hit its magic number – 100,000 apps will be ready for download when the phone goes on sale. That's a big, round, perfect-for-headlines figure. But some of the the key services are missing. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are baked in to the OS, and Amazon just put out a Kindle app for BlackBerry 10. But there are still big holes. No Instagram and no Netflix, most notably. Also, no GroupMe, no Flipboard and no Path. No official Flickr app, though there are some apps that interface with Flickr. Skype is weeks away. Also, Google pulled support for a native Google Voice app recently. YouTube is there, but with the Big G focusing on its own mobile platform, BlackBerry 10 could be left out.

And even if you don't care about Instagram and Netflix (frankly, everything has Netflix now) it's painful to go without the apps that you use on a daily basis that might not make the headlines. GroupMe, Path, and Surfline are apps I use everyday, and they're missing from BlackBerry World. Low-quality, third-party apps that connect to big-name services don't cut it. That's the biggest hit against the Z10 and BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry World might be adding apps everyday, but the quality and depth might not be enough.

Something to note: You can side-load Android apps onto the Z10. It's a feature BlackBerry turned on for Android developers to allow them to more easily port their apps to the new platform. To get it to work, I had to follow three different how-tos, activate two different services, enter a lot of terminal commands, and turn off the security settings in Chrome on my laptop. And of the 11 apps I loaded, I only got three to work (barely).

At least the keyboard is amazing. It had better be, especially for a company that's long been personified by the business worker desperately clinging to some QWERTY brick of yesteryear.

But doubters take note, the on-screen keyboard experience here is great. The predictive text helps you fly through long passages. After a few days of regular tap-typing, the predictions got better and better, and I found myself swiping to use the predicted words more often that not. (For those from-my-cold-dead-hands types, the device with the physical keyboard you want is the yet-to-be-released Q10, which runs the same new software as the Z10.)

On the hardware front, the Z10 resembles a slightly embiggened iPhone 5 with a rubberized back, a 4.2-inch 1280x768 356-pixel-per-inch LCD screen and an 8-megapixel camera. The camera takes good pictures – not great, but good. It also has a "Time Shift" feature that takes multiple frames of a photo so you can pick the best one. This is helpful if you remember to use it – it's not on by default.

The insides – a dual-core 1.5GHz ARM processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage that can be expanded via microSDXC – are about what you'd expect on a $200 phone. You'll need the extra storage if you plan on adding any media, as 16GB is a pretty paltry baseline.

So what's the bottom line on the new BlackBerry? Good hardware, nice features and a growing, but flawed, ecosystem. The Z10 is a great phone, but not an amazing phone, and that's what it would need to be if I were to recommend buying one over an iPhone or a flagship Android handset. At this point, I'd only suggest that long-time BlackBerry users check one out. They will likely find it reason to stick with the platform, even if the company appears to still be treading to stay afloat instead of swimming forward.

WIRED Outstanding keyboard. Interface is a nice update to the UI that Palm built. Nice hardware overall.

TIRED Ecosystem is still lacking, even with all those apps. Hub can be too overwhelming. Swipe-based navigation is actually too swipey.