![]() ![]() ![]() There’s no physical silencer switch (only a software function). Other phones do NFC sharing, but rarely as simply. Thanks to NFC (near-field communication), you can shoot a photo, map, Web page, app, file or song to another BlackBerry 10 owner, wirelessly, on the spot. (BlackBerry 10 required older BlackBerry models can use BBM only for texts.) You can even screencast - share what you’re doing on your screen with your conversation partner, like a map, an app or a photographic snap. The popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service now lets you make free phone calls and video calls over the Internet. When the employee leaves the company, one stroke deletes the whole corporate or personal half. ![]() They appear together - but without the work password, only the personal stuff is visible. If a company has BlackBerry’s corporate software suite, separate worlds can be created on each phone: personal and work, with distinct calendars, address books, wallpaper and even app collections. The BlackBerry 10 neatly solves a huge problem for corporate techies: how to keep employees’ work phones secure in a world where people also use their phones for personal things. You repeat with the next face, and the next, until you’ve dialed up the perfect fraction of a second, independently, for each person in the shot. You take a photo of people - then, with your finger on a face, you can dial forward or backward up to two seconds in time, seeking that perfect expression. One feature, Time Shift, is mind-blowing. Freaky and brilliant and very, very fast. When I tried that same passage later, I typed only one letter: the I in “I’m.” Thereafter, the phone predicted each successive word in those sentences, requiring no letter-key presses at all. The more you use the BlackBerry, the more it learns your way of writing. I type 20 characters it typed 61 for me.īut wait, there’s more. There is a really good episode of Dancing With the Stars on.” The BlackBerry proposed the rest: “ I’m going to have to cancel for tonight. How well does it work? In this passage, the only letters I actually had to type are shown in bold. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key - or ignore it and keep typing. ![]() If you’ve typed “made of sil,” for example, the word “silicone” appears over the letter I key, “silver” over the V, and “silk” over the K. Stay with me here:Īs you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys - guesses as to the word you’re most likely to want. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10.īut you might not need it. The BlackBerry’s big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. It’s a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub - a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. It’s the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It’s lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas. Well, BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. Besides - even if there were some great phone, what prayer did BlackBerry have of catching up to the iPhone and Android phones now? Even Microsoft, with its slick, quick Windows Phone, hasn’t managed that trick. Nobody believed anything the company said anymore. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed. The company - which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry - kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. The whole operation seemed to be one gnat-sneeze away from total collapse. In the last two years, the BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and lost its C.E.O.’s. The company’s stock has crashed almost 90 percent from its 2008 peak. Once dominant, the BlackBerry has slipped to a single-digit percentage of the smartphone market. I told all of them the same thing: that it’s doomed. This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who’s recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. ![]()
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