The BlackBerry Z30 finished CES with a battle scar, but it emerged a ThunderPhone champion. Photo: Liz Stinson/WIRED
This is the first time I’ve used a real keyboard in eight days. I feel like I’m playing a piano.
I finally got re-acquainted with my old friend after using nothing but a Blackberry Z30 for six days straight in WIRED’s Smartphone Thunderdome Challenge. In case you missed it, our Gadget Lab reporters used nothing but phones to cover CES. It sounds like an absurd idea, but it turned out to have major benefits. In fact, after six days of non-stop snapping and tapping, I have a newfound admiration for the phone. Also, I may never bring a laptop to CES again.
What I liked about using the BlackBerry Z30
I came into Smartphone Thunderdome having only used the BlackBerry Z30 for a couple of days. But I wasn’t a BlackBerry rookie. I had been using a Z10 (a smaller, more-plasticky version of a touchscreen BB10 phone) for a couple of months. I was used to the new BlackBerry OS’s unique features.
The touchscreen BlackBerries don’t have any navigation buttons. You operate them by swiping the screen using different gestures, which takes a bit of getting used to. And even though they don’t have hardware keyboards, their touchscreen keyboards are the best ones I’ve ever used.
The most commonly mentioned feature of the BlackBerry’s touchscreen keyboard is its “flick-to-type” approach to word suggestions, which really does help when you get the hang of it. For example, instead of having to type out “onomatopoeia,” you type in “onom,” and the word “onomatopoeia” appears above the “a” key. You flick up on the “a” key to add that word. It saves a ton of time on longer or more commonly used words. Plus, it works as a preemptive spell-check.
The touchscreen keyboard on the BlackBerry is no joke. The flick-to-type feature saves time.
I used that feature quite a bit, especially later in the week when my hands were sweaty and weary. But even when I didn’t, the keyboard just seemed very accurate in terms of response and text-correction when I was in fingers-flying mode. The five-inch screen size of the Z30 certainly helped there, too. It was a lot more comfortable to type on than the 4.2-inch screen on the smaller Z10. Actually, the Smartphone Thunderdome challenge was the first time I actually craved a “phablet.” The bigger the screen for this kind of mobile-only coverage, the better.
The Z30 is a really well-built phone. It has rich-sounding stereo speakers and a big-but-not-too-big 5-inch AMOLED screen. I’m betting that if it ran Android, it would probably be one of the most popular phones in the Android realm. There’s an elegant but durable aluminum bumper on the bottom of it that saved my screen from cracking at least once. I accidentally dropped it — bottom corner down, without a case, onto concrete — which dented and scuffed the bumper but didn’t affect the screen whatsoever. An iPhone 4 or 4S would have been a goner.
Its detachable back is also durable and feels nice. It’s made of woven carbon fiber, so it’s pretty much impossible to scuff or crack. You can remove the back to expand storage with a microSD card. You can’t remove or replace the battery by yourself, but it gave me plenty of juice for each day’s antics. I’d guess about 8-10 hours of consistent usage per charge, although I plugged it in many times a day to be on the safe side.
In retrospect, I really liked the BlackBerry Hub, too. It’s basically a universal inbox that you can set up to feed all your incoming alerts and messages to a single place. To be honest, I didn’t even realize how useful it was until later in the show, when my colleagues missed some information about a “flash challenge” that would only last for 10 minutes. Because I had a single hub I kept checking for everything — emails, text messages, Tumblr updates, and incoming Tweets — I felt like I was always on top of disparate forms of communication. I didn’t even have to jump between apps to stay in the loop.
This is basically what I saw when I was awake last week. Photo: Liz Stinson/WIRED
There were features I didn’t use, and that basically came down to personal preference. For example, BB10 phones have voice-control and speech-to-text features. I didn’t use them because I never use those with any phone. I prefer to type in notes by hand, because it helps me retain information in my own brain and it forces me to pay attention to whoever is talking. For notes, I used the Docs to Go app that comes pre-installed on the Z30. It lets you create .doc and .xls files.
What I didn’t like about using the BlackBerry Z30
It’s no secret that today’s mobile world is much different than the one BlackBerry dominated just a few years ago. It’s not enough to just be a capable phone. You have to be a platform, a device that’s constantly evolving and adding new functions, features, and fun stuff via third-party app development.
And that’s the BlackBerry’s weak point. It’s a very capable business phone, and it even offers the audio and video hardware to be a damn good entertainment phone. The trouble is, not many people are actively developing apps for it.
Case in point, I had to “side-load” the Tumblr app to even take part in Smartphone Thunderdome. It’s a process that involved downloading the BlackBerry PlayBook (remember that?) app manager to my computer, downloading an app file to my computer, flipping my phone to “Developer Mode,” and running some command-line instructions from my computer to get the Tumblr app installed on my phone. I didn’t mind it much, but it’s a significant barrier for most users.
For BlackBerry users, that’s supposed to change with the next OS update. BlackBerry OS 10.2.1 will support downloading and running Android apps directly from a handset. The new OS may not support running all Android apps, but it will still be a huge step forward for anyone using a BB10 device.
Until then, the lack of apps can cost you money. If you don’t want to tackle the side-loading approach (which worked for Tumblr but didn’t work for the Instagram app I tried to install), there are third-party Tumblr clients that cost $2 each. The lack of a GroupMe app for BB10 — which we used for team communication while at CES — meant that I received everything as a text message. As a result, I had gone over my monthly data plan and was charged an overage fee by the second day of the show.
I wasn’t too hot on the Z30′s camera, either, although I was pleasantly surprised by the way the pictures looked after they made it onto WIRED. Still, there are a couple of noticeable shortcomings with the camera. It can be slow to focus unless you’re out in the bright sunlight. It’s also not the most logical UI: You drag a box on the camera viewfinder to the point you’d like to focus on, although everybody’s first instinct is to tap part of the screen to focus and shoot. Plus, the lack of imaging apps — no Aviary, no Instagram, no Vine, unless you want to side-load them, which was a no-no in this smartphone-only contest — really limits your options with the camera.
The people were way more important than the phones
Would the results have been any different if Christina, Roberto, Mat, and I had all been using different phones? I’m not sure. I don’t think my smartphone power-moves are any better than those of my esteemed colleagues. For me, it just came down to a bunch of human emotions.
This is what motivated me: (1) I admire and respect everybody I work with, and they brought out the best in me, (2) I am the new guy on the Gadget Lab team, and I felt like I had something to prove, (3) I had kind people on Twitter and BlackBerry forums cheering me on, and I didn’t want to let them down, and (4) I was in third place heading into the last day of competition. All of that stuff got my competitive juices flowing. It helped that the last day’s bonus challenge involved typing as many words as possible.
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Original article: Wired.Com
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