Quick look at Z10 features that may sway consumers

Here are five things about the Z10 that will impress BlackBerry aficionados and may sway smartphone consumers without entrenched allegiances to Apple or Android.

Look and feel While not overwhelmingly distinct looking, the BlackBerry Z10 looks the part of a modern, svelte smartphone and once turned on, it responds well to touches and swipes. The screen is razor sharp and every movement feels fluid and fast, from cycling between the home screens to loading apps to browsing the web.

BlackBerry Hub For users who have a work email account, one or two personal accounts and a slew of social media profiles — including Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn — BlackBerry Hub is a handy way to keep track of them all. All messages and notifications from the various accounts get merged into one universal inbox with no need to separately log in to a bunch of sites.

Finally a decent selection of apps While still lagging far behind what’s available on iPhones and Android devices, BlackBerry World promises to have a robust selection of more than 70,000 apps to download at launch, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Kindle, WhatsApp, Angry Birds, Songza, Slacker, Rdio, NHL.com, CBC, Tim Hortons, Air Canada, RBC and ING Direct.

Typing made easier Those who love BlackBerrys with QWERTY keyboards will want to wait for the Q10, expected out in April, but a lot of work went into making life bearable for users who will need to do a lot of typing on the Z10. It has a smart predictive text engine that senses what you’re trying to type and will autocorrect mistakes, as smartphone users are used to. But it also has a unique feature to speed up the typing process. As you input letters, it predicts what word you’re working toward and if it’s correct, you can quickly swipe at that word to have it filled in.

A cool camera app It likely won’t be solely responsible for many sales, but the BlackBerry 10 camera app is a good example of an innovative twist on what could have been a ho-hum app. The BlackBerry 10 app takes a burst of photos and lets you easily scan through them to find the best of the bunch. The app can detect multiple faces in a frame and allows the user to individually pick the best frame for each person so everyone appears smiling and in focus.