Its funny when consumers want something different from smartphones or a new space to become a fanboy in and when that something comes out, no one is interested. I guess Steve Jobs was right when he said “Consumers don’t know what they want.” In this particular case, they don’t have a clue. I think both Microsoft and RIM have done great things on the mobile space as consumers have looked past them.
Yesterday was BlackBerry’s first day of their developer’s conference and the new CEO and many executives were present to demo what looks to be a nearly-finished BlackBerry 10 OS. While previously we only caught teasers and short demos, they really showed off what they have been working on all of this time. RIM went more in-depth about navigating around the new UI of BlackBerry 10. First and foremost , BB 10 isn’t just the PlayBook OS but borrows cues/gestures from it to make it a more innovative and intuitive experience.
The new UI RIM is using is called BlackBerry Flow where everything just flows with each other and in real time. To take your BB 10 device out of sleep mode, you simply just swipe from the bottom of the screen up a la PlayBook. You also have Active Frames on your homescreen that may resemble Live Tiles but work in a similar fashion. With BlackBerry Peek, a sleek new way to view your notifications while still staying productive in whatever app you are using. You just swipe up once you receive a notification and if you want to view more, you swipe to the left to view the message in its entirety. BlackBerry was already one of the first platforms to use the unified inbox idea but has gone and made it look impressive with BlackBerry Hub. The Hub allows you to manage all of your conversations via BBM, email, Facebook, Twitter, texts, or LinkedIn into one central communications hub.
The BlackBerry platform has been stale for a bit as many users have flocked elsewhere, myself included. Maybe because BlackBerry was my first real smartphone experience and even though I have an iPhone 5, I still miss the QWERTY keyboard perfection and the best push email on Earth. Consumers and analysts will be skeptics as RIM still has to prove it can provide a decent app ecosystem as that’s what its all about these days as Windows Phone is suffering from the same issue. RIM announced some popular apps making its way to BB 10 like along with a strong carrier support.
I gladly look forward to the future of BlackBerry. But I know I am not alone in rooting for RIM’s success, publicly not silently. But who out there is with me?
