BlackBerry 10 has been more or less a mystery in the past few months, with a number of delays and continuous “death threats” to RIM from various blogs, but everything has been put to silence by the details and demos from the latest BlackBerry event – the BB Jam Americas, currently happening at San Jose, California.
The company has revealed some of the more interesting consumer facing features that are part of the new BlackBerry 10 user experience, fondly called as the BlackBerry Flow. BlackBerry flow is a new kind of UX meant for the new upcoming BB10 devices. It includes a live view of apps in a grid on the main screen called Active frames, they are more like how the N9 multitasking view works. The interaction mainly consists of upward swipes, very much like the RTOS gestures on the BlackBerry playbook.
A swipe up and left swipe gestures reveals the BlackBerry hub, which is an app that converges all your conversations into one place. The hub is always there, and has important notifications too. They also show off how “intuitively” you can set the alarm, and “pull down the shades” when it is time for sleep. You can view the features explained above, in this video here –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmND2-fkUD0
Additionally, the BlackBerry app world has been redesigned and it got its first look too, in this short video explaining the new features and the design –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GxQB9PLXNQ
The new browser on BlackBerry 10, is currently the highest scoring browser on the “in development” column, in the HTML5 official website. It’s curious to see how the overall UI, is using the sliding panel motif, which was initially made popular on iOS with the facebook app. A lot of apps use it now, including most official Google apps. There is also a reader mode inside the browser, which is increasingly becoming a wanted feature, on all mobile browsers. They also showcase how the browser handles HTML5 with access to the live camera feed and other features.
Here is a demo of the new browser in action –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onNTDUncA44
There was also an extended demo of the previously mentioned features and some new ones, like BlackBerry peek, which lets you peek at the current overview of the notifications you have received.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzxQ2YUjk50
On the hardware side, the devices that were running the latest version of BB10, were apparently the latest alpha device, called the BlackBerry dev alpha B, which, according to various blogs, looks like the upcoming BB10 device inside a chunky box. We think so too, considering the launch is getting closer, with December, probably the month when the devices finally arrive.
There is much more left for RIM to show off, and we are looking forward to seeing what they have. But the real question is, will it be good enough to actually manage to stay or dethrone Microsoft as the third mobile ecosystem?
via BlackBerry Blog – official