RIM Launches Next-Generation BlackBerry Z10, Announces Corporate Rebranding
Research in Motion today announced its next-generation smartphone, the Z10. RIM also announced a corporate rebranding, officially changing the name of the company to BlackBerry.
All four U.S. carriers are expected to carry the Z10, shipping in March and starting at $199 with a two-year contract. Walt Mossberg, reviewing the Z10 for the Wall Street Journal, notes that a physical keyboard-equipped Q10 model is due in April as well. He notes that in "moderate to heavy use", the battery didn't last as long as a charge on an iPhone 5 in similar usage, but he did have some praise for the device.
BlackBerry has always leaned heavily on its physical keyboard, and, according to Mossberg, the virtual keyboard on the Z10 shines as well:
The Z10 keyboard is the best and fastest out-of-the-box virtual keyboard I’ve used. Master BlackBerry thumb typists might not find it as fast as the traditional physical keyboard, but, for a one-finger typist like me, it was faster and more accurate than either the native keyboards on the iPhone or Android. This is partly because it features predictive typing. It displays words that are likely to come next right above the rows of letters, and lets you flick these words upward into the text you’re composing. It learns what mistakes you typically make in hitting letters, and adjusts. And it learns words and abbreviations you frequently use, even proper names.
The company promises 70,000 apps at launch, including staples like Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, MLB, and more. Many notable apps are missing however, including Pandora, Spotify and Netflix.
The Z10 comes with a 4.2" 1280x768 display, giving it a higher pixel density than the iPhone 5; an 8 megapixel rear camera; 16GB capacity only, but includes a card slot for storage upgrades; available in white or black; a removable battery; and LTE support, though Mossberg got extremely poor data speeds on AT&T and RIM couldn't explain why.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
Competition...
Just wanted to put that rant out there. I didn't even mention the pissy yellow tinted screen again...