Two Weeks With BB10 – A Nice Phone, But It’s Not Satisfying My APPetite

As you may know from a previous post, I was selected to be part of Virgin Mobile Canada’s Blackberry Z10 tester team (if you want to read about that, click here). I’ve been tweeting tips and tricks with the #vmtester hashtag, and have spent enough time with the phone to share some thoughts.

I was very excited for this phone, but a little skeptical because I hated the Blackberry Curve I had before my iPhone. I’m happy to say the Z10 has changed my feelings toward Blackberry.

I love this phone  – it’s very light, fast, and I’m a big fan of the swipe gestures (I’ve even found myself trying to swipe on my Android tablet). Here’s what else I love:

• The Hub – I love looking at and responding to all my messages and notifications in one place
• The virtual keyboard is very accurate and fast
• The fast web browser
• The fluid interface – you can seamlessly flow in and out of apps without actually closing them, and peek at notifications without closing apps
• How easy it is to sync content with my Macbook
• The camera – it takes great pictures and you can snap them with the volume buttons or by touching anywhere on the screen. It especially takes great cat photos (see below):

BB10 has great cat photo taking capabilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s what I’m not loving:

•  The lack of killer apps!

The phone came loaded with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, but the Facebook and Twitter ones were junk. Also very unfortunate is the lack of apps in general: where are the apps for my transit system, my bank, Instagram (it’s coming, but it won’t be a native app), Draw Something, and any good Twitter apps or games? Blackberry boasted 70,000 apps at launch, but I’ve been hard pressed to find many great ones in Blackberry World – most of them have little actual value.

I’ve sideloaded a few Android apps such as Facebook, Hootsuite, and Pinterest, and they work great, but it’s a little bit of work and I would much prefer being able to download them with a few clicks (click here to read a great tutorial on how to sideload Android apps from your Mac).

If you’re not a huge app person, this won’t matter to you and you’ll probably love the phone. It’s a great phone, but I want want to be able to do more with it. Hopefully more apps will come, but I don’t want to wait forever.

Do you have a BB10? Do you want to get one?