So I did something kind of pointless on Friday. I drove out to the AT&T store on my lunch break specifically to go paw at a BlackBerry Z10, which went on sale in the US that day for $199.99 on a two-year contract (or $599.99 if you want to be a free agent about it, which, who does that anymore). It's been out in the UK and Canada since late January, but AT&T had the exclusive window here before Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile get it at the end of the month.
I wasn't planning to buy one. I just wanted to hold it, because I've been oddly invested in whether the company formerly known as Research In Motion can pull off a comeback, even though I have zero intention of switching from my iPhone. Is that a weird thing to root for? Maybe. I just don't love a world where there's exactly two smartphone platforms that matter and everyone else quietly dies.
The phone itself is nicer than I expected, honestly. All-touch, no physical keyboard, which is a real departure for BlackBerry and probably the right call even if it upsets the diehards. The screen's sharp, it feels solid in the hand, not cheap plastic like some of the Android stuff in the same case. The keyboard software has this swipe-up gesture where predicted words float above the letters and you flick them into the text box instead of tapping — it's clever, and it actually worked better than I thought it would in the two minutes I spent typing "the quick brown fox" over and over like an idiot while the sales guy watched.
The problem, and it's the same problem it's always going to be, is BB10 World (their app store, still can't believe that's the name) is thin. The guy at the store pulled up the storefront and past the headline apps like Facebook and Twitter it thins out fast. No Instagram. No real Netflix at launch as far as I could tell. This is the thing that killed Palm's webOS and it's going to be the thing BlackBerry has to claw its way out of for at least a year, probably longer, and I'm not sure they have a year. Thorsten Heins keeps saying developers are coming. Developers are always coming.
I keep thinking about the Palm Pre comparison because I owned one of those in 2009 and loved it right up until the exact moment my contract was up and I bailed for an iPhone 3GS, because loving a good keyboard and a nice OS doesn't matter if the app is just missing entirely. Software UX excellence is not a substitute for the app existing. I don't think BlackBerry's execs are dumb, I think they know this, I just don't know if knowing it is enough at this point.
Anyway. Small tangent, not really related, but I've also been half-watching this bitcoin thing spike this week — apparently the whole Cyprus bank mess has people spooked enough about deposits getting frozen or taxed that money's sloshing into it, and the price has been climbing in a way that feels less like tech adoption and more like people panicking somewhere else in the world. I don't own any, never have, mostly because the couple of times I looked into actually buying some the process felt sketchy enough that I closed the tab. Maybe that's a mistake. Maybe I'll write about it properly if it keeps doing whatever it's doing. Not today though.
Back to the Z10 for a second: the thing that actually surprised me most wasn't the hardware, it was how empty the store was for a Friday launch. No line, no display crowd, just me and one other guy who I'm fairly sure worked for a local IT reseller and was there to check specs for a client, not to buy one for himself. Compare that to any iPhone launch day and it's not close. That's not a knock on the phone, which again, I liked more than I expected to. It's just a pretty blunt signal about where people's heads already are.
I don't think this is the last BlackBerry post I'll write this year. I have a feeling I'll be checking back in on this thing in a few months to see if the app gap closed at all, or if it's exactly where it is right now, just older.