So AT&T finally started selling the BlackBerry Z10 yesterday, and I had a rare quiet lunch hour, so I walked down to the store on 4th and actually messed with one instead of just reading about it on my phone like a normal person.
Quick context in case you've been ignoring the whole thing (fair, honestly): this is the first real phone running BlackBerry 10, the software RIM has been promising would save the company since basically forever. They even renamed themselves BlackBerry a couple months back, like a fresh coat of paint on the name was going to do the heavy lifting. The Z10's been out in the UK and Canada since late January, but the US launch was delayed and delayed, and it finally showed up on AT&T shelves March 22nd. $199.99 on a two year contract, which, come on, in 2013 that's just what every flagship costs, it's not exactly a bold statement.
The guy at the store (name tag said Marcus, seemed like he'd rather be anywhere else) let me hold it for a solid ten minutes without hovering, which I appreciated. First impression: the hardware is genuinely nice. It's all black, soft-touch back, feels dense in a way that makes an iPhone 5 feel like a toy by comparison. No physical keyboard at all, which is going to be a gut punch to the diehards who've kept BlackBerry alive out of pure keyboard loyalty, but the on-screen keyboard has this word-prediction thing where you swipe up on a suggested word to insert it. I typed "the meeting is at" and it correctly guessed I wanted "3" next, which is a small thing but it actually worked, unlike every other predictive keyboard I've tried that just guesses "the."
The real selling point is this thing called BlackBerry Hub. You swipe up from the bottom bezel and over to the left and it pulls everything into one feed, texts, BBM, email, Facebook, Twitter, calendar notifications, all of it, sorted by time. I've been complaining for two years that my phone makes me check four different apps to know if anyone's trying to reach me, and this is the first attempt I've seen that actually solves that instead of just talking about solving it. Genuinely impressed by that part.
And yet. I stood there flipping through the app storefront (BlackBerry World, terrible name) and it's just thin. No Instagram. No real Spotify, they've got some workaround. A handful of banking apps and a lot of stuff I didn't recognize. Marcus admitted, kind of sheepishly, that most people who come in ask about it and then buy an iPhone anyway once they see the app situation. I believe him completely. Hardware and that Hub feature are legitimately ahead of what's on my phone right now, and it will not matter, because nobody wants to be the one person at the table who can't get the app their friend just told them to download. I give this maybe eighteen months before AT&T quietly stops promoting it.
Small tangent because I can't help it: I also asked Marcus if they were seeing return traffic from people annoyed about Google killing Reader, since that news is still all anyone in my Twitter feed is talking about, ten days later. He had no idea what I was talking about, which, fair, wrong store for that question. I finally moved my own feeds over to Feedly last weekend after putting it off for a week, and it imported everything in about thirty seconds flat, folders and all. Barely had to think about it. So credit where it's due on that front even though I'm still annoyed at Google for making me do it in the first place.
Anyway. If you're a BlackBerry loyalist who's been white-knuckling an old Bold waiting for a reason to stay, the Z10 might actually be that reason, and I don't say that sarcastically. For everyone else it's a phone you play with in a store for ten minutes, say "huh, that's pretty good actually," and then buy the thing your friends already have. I don't think that's a knock on the engineering. I think it's just too late in the game for engineering alone to matter anymore.