Latest BlackBerry 10 better, but still falls short
BlackBerry might be down, but it’s not out — at least not yet.
The smartphone pioneer has struggled mightily in recent years, seeing its sales and market share plummet in the face of the onslaught from phones running Google’s Android operating system and, to a lesser degree, the iPhone. The company’s long-awaited response to those phones — a collection of touch-screen devices running a completely revamped operating system launched last year under the name BlackBerry 10 — has done nothing to arrest that decline.
BlackBerry has continued to plug away, releasing new devices and updating its software. When BlackBerry 10 launched, it was buggy and lacking in features. But thanks to improvements, it is more refined.
This spring, the company rolled out its latest update, prosaically dubbed 10.2.1. Perhaps the most-notable improvements are those to its so-called Hub. Located just to the left of the main home screen, the Hub is a kind of universal inbox that brings together your latest email and text messages, updates from particular Facebook friends and Twitter mentions.
BlackBerry also has added tools to allow users to better sift through all those messages. One cool new feature is the ability to sort messages by pinching the screen. Depending on how you configure the feature, you can pinch to see just priority messages or all unread messages.
Another neat feature in the Hub is a button for showing documents that are attached in particular messages. If you are looking for the spreadsheet you received from a colleague, you don’t have to manually sift through all the messages you received from her; instead, you can press the button, view only your attachments and then search just through them.
Another messaging-related tweak allows you, when you receive a text or a BBM message, to respond to it by pressing a button without leaving the app you’re in. Instead of switching you to another app, it opens up a small text box on top of the app you are in.
The changes in 10.2.1 go beyond messaging. Older versions of BlackBerry 10 would display icons on the lock screen that showed you how many unread email messages you had or how many alerts you had received recently. Now, you can tap on each of those icons and see short previews of the mostrecent messages or alerts. And you can go directly from the lock screen to a particular message by double-tapping it. The feature works similarly to the lock-screen notifications on the iPhone, except that BlackBerry 10 groups similar notifications together.
On the whole, the new features help make BlackBerry 10 feel much more complete than it did at launch. But they don’t help the software overcome its two biggest problems.
The first of these is that there’s little about BlackBerry 10 that stands out as unique or compellingly different. Yes, the Hub helps you manage messages better than the default email managers for Android devices or the iPhone, and if messaging were still the primary use of smartphones, that might be a big point in BlackBerry’s favor. But it’s not. And you can find third-party apps for the iPhone and Android devices that can better help you manage your messages on those devices.
Beyond the Hub, the features BlackBerry 10 offers are similar to what you’ll find for the iPhone or Android devices although, in some cases, they are less well-developed. Although BlackBerry 10 offers some voicecontrol abilities, for example, it doesn’t have an intelligent assistant as capable as Apple’s Siri or Google Now.
The other big problem is that BlackBerry 10 still suffers from a dearth of applications. Although the company’s store has 140,000 BlackBerry 10 apps, that number is a small fraction of what you’ll find for the iPhone or Android and is padded with lots of junk. Search for “Netflix” or “Pandora” and you’ll find things such as “What’s New on Netflix” and the “Pandora City Guide,” but you won’t find either one of those popular streaming media apps.
It’s great to see BlackBerry, despite everything, continuing to tinker with BlackBerry 10. Unfortunately, even though it’s better and more refined, it’s still not compelling enough to recommend it over Android or Apple’s iOS.
Troy Wolverton is a technology columnist for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.