Good showing in the stores today. Plenty of little queues and interest. Too bad not enough stores were able to get full demos up and running. I had a go for quite a few mins. Flow is a little idiosyncratic but so can Android be, so one can probably get used to it.
The keyboard is fast, faster than a physical keyboard, however I don't need to look at the on screen keys when I type on the Android predictive typing any more, so my eyes only casually glance at the predictive text suggestion bar and on the sentence I am typing. The BB predictive text means you MUST look at the next key you're going to hit as the small size font of the suggestive words is also darting all over the bottom half of the screen and sometimes blocked by one's own fingers. The text suggested by Android's system is never blocked by your own fingers and doesn't require the eyes to follow one's keystrokes. However for one handed typing it works well. For two handed it is counter intuitive.
The native filing system is muuuuuuuch better than the PB QNX fiasco! Finally!
I experienced some slightly buggy swiping away from the hub into messages and back out, not sure why that was.
Over all the (recent apps page) is not a strong enough feature to trump Android, as Android provides the same feature with no limit, along with an apps page and up to 7 home screens with widgets. BB10 is closer to iPhone's OS. I couldn't seem to experience this "multitasking" BB pitches, as the "widgets" weren't exactly moving or playing in the background. It's as multi-tasking as the PB was....meaning a video will pause when you swipe out of the app. I filmed a little video on the Z10 and it would not play in the background or foreground of another app. No split screen either, or least I couldn't easily figure out how to split 2 apps on the same screen. No one I saw could figure that out, if it is even capable. Some shoppers were suggesting 4 apps could be split across the screen and actively be running, but no one could figure out how to do it.
Youtube....web portal.
Apps, couldn't test...obviously.
In the end it would probably take someone a good week of using the phone to either fall in love or hate it's guts. The PB was deceptively useful until I tried to actually use it for work and required attaching files, using web portals (instead of apps) and have it remember my log in details, etc. All those little failings made the PB unusable.
If the net speeds are as fast as a native app, and something stupid like lack of cookie retention is not a problem like with the PB, then one could probably go without a youtube or other web portal. But only time with the product will reveal details like that.
For example, how well does pinch and zoom work on an inbedded map within a web page? Again that was a disaster on the PB that made the Rlink "app" near useless, along with the non-retained cookies!
All in all the OS looks better than Apple's. The hardware is decent. But the apps will make a huge difference. The product looks slightly ahead of an iPhone imo, but Apple still has a slick piece of hardware, funky peripherals, and the best app support...that may still be enough to not lose much ground to BB.
Good day for BB today. Wonder how the stock did.