The BlackBerry has been reinvented to join the mix of today's touch smart phones. Walt Mossberg gives us his take on the new BlackBerry OS, and five important things you should know about RIM's new phones. (Photo: Research In Motion) 
 
 There is a new smartphone coming to market, running on a new operating system. It's an all-touch device—with no physical navigation controls and no physical keyboard—and serves as a platform for third-party apps. It's meant to compete in a world defined by Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones. It's a BlackBerry, reinvented from the ground up. 
 
 Finally, a New BlackBerry See a 360-degree view of the touch-screen BlackBerry Z10 and explore features and specifications. View Graphics Dov Friedman/The Wall Street Journal Re-Entering the Phone Fray Compare the Z10 to some popular smartphones. View Graphics Photos From the Event The company unveiled two new phones in New York. View Slideshow Mario Tama/Getty Images 
 
 This model, called the Z10, and its operating system, called BB10, are bet-the-company moves by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion . RIM has seen its once-dominant position in the market shrivel away, especially in the U.S., since the iPhone appeared in 2007. It has tried a couple of times to drop its famous physical keyboards for touch screens, but those projects failed—partly because the old BlackBerry operating system, designed to handle corporate email, was a poor platform for app developers. 
 
 Now, RIM is hoping that BB10 can change all that, so much so that it is changing its corporate name to BlackBerry. The new OS, which is the most important part of the product, isn't an evolution of the old BlackBerry platform. It is a clean break. Its user interface is so different that it will seem foreign to longtime BlackBerry users. And the first phone to use it, the Z10, looks much more like its rivals than like traditional BlackBerrys. 
 
 I've been testing the Z10 for about a week and decided to approach it as a new entry from a new company, because it is so different from past BlackBerrys. Overall, it worked fine in my tests, but I found it a work in progress. I liked some things a lot, including the way RIM has designed its new virtual keyboard and camera, and the way it gathers all your messages into a single Hub. But it will launch with just a fraction of the apps available from its competitors, and is missing some very popular titles. It also lacks its own cloud-based ecosystem for storing and sharing files, like Apple's iCloud or Google Drive. And there are other missing or lagging features. 
 
 Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins talks with WSJ's William Connors about what to expect from the BlackBerry Z10, how much RIM is staking on the launch, and what's in store for company beyond the new phones. 
 
 Fervent BlackBerry fans might shun the Z10 for its lack of a physical keyboard, while fervent iPhone and Android fans might shun it for its small selection of apps and lack of native cloud services. 
 
 RIM formally announced the Z10 and BB10 this week and the new phone will go on sale in some countries almost immediately. In the U.S., all four major carriers are expected to sell the phone, for $199, according to RIM, but the company says it won't be available until mid-March. 
 
 A second BB10 phone, the Q10, due in April, may be an easier transition for BlackBerry addicts, since it will have a physical keyboard. But RIM sees typing on glass as its future and will be emphasizing the touch model. 
 
 Hardware 
 
 The Z10 is basically a chunky plastic slab, midway in size and weight between the tall, slim iPhone 5 and the bigger, wider crop of new Android models. I found it felt good in the hand. Its high-resolution 4.2-inch screen is a bit bigger than the iPhone's 4-inch display, though much smaller than many newer Android screens, which are creeping toward 5 inches. The rear camera is the same 8 megapixels as on the iPhone and Android models like Google's flagship Nexus 4. It comes in black and white, and has only one memory configuration—16 gigabytes (the base on the iPhone)—but the memory can be expanded by up to 32 more gigabytes using a removable card. Unlike many phones today, it has a removable battery. 
 
 User Interface 
 
 You unlock the phone by swiping up from the bottom border. The phone displays the last screen you were on. A similar swipe from any screen will take you to the home position, which displays minimized versions of up to eight apps currently running, with each displayed as a large rectangle showing some information from the app, such as weather or appointments. These are called Active Frames. From there, swiping to the left takes you through screens of app icons, similar to those on Apple and Android phones. Swiping from the bottom minimizes any open app into an Active Frame. I found these gestures easy to use and remember. 
 
 BlackBerry Hub 
 
 Although it isn't technically the home screen, RIM expects most users to spend most of their time in the device's unified inbox, called BlackBerry Hub. To reach the Hub, you swipe right from the display of running apps, or, if you're on any other screen, you swipe up and to the right in a curved gesture from the bottom border—that one takes a little practice. 
 
 The Hub contains emails from all the accounts you've set up on the phone, as well as text messages, messages from RIM's BlackBerry Messenger service, and even updates from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 
 
 Unlike on older BlackBerrys, there aren't separate icons for various email accounts; they are visible only via the Hub. But you can swipe right from the Hub to see each account and view only its contents. If you swipe down while in the Hub, you see upcoming calendar events. 
 
 Keyboard 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Research in Motion The Z10's virtual keyboard is fast and easy to use, partly because of its predictive typing. 
 
 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. 
 
 Apps 
 
 RIM claims it will have 70,000 apps at launch. Others are promised shortly afterward. That sounds like a lot, but Apple is approaching 800,000 and Android has over 700,000. RIM's app store, called BlackBerry World, includes—or will soon include—some common and standard apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Major League Baseball. But at launch, it will be missing Instagram, Pandora, Spotify, NPR, Google Maps and Netflix, among many others. 
 
 Work and Personal 
 
 If you use a corporate network controlled by an IT department, and want to keep your work and personal apps separate, BB10 has a simple way to do it. You just swipe down and press a button called "Personal" or "Work" and the apps, and even the background, change. However, email and calendar entries are still intermingled. 
 
 Camera, Voice and Battery Life 
 
 The camera has a cool feature called TimeShift that allows you to adjust individual faces in a group shot to get different views of them—say, smiling instead of frowning—by capturing additional images just before or after the snapshot. Voice calls were excellent. I didn't do a formal battery test, but in my moderate to heavy use of the phone, I found it didn't last as long on a charge as the iPhone 5, and began to get pretty low by late afternoon. It would last some people an entire day, but not everyone. 
 
 Browser 
 
 I found the browser adequate, but noticeably slower than the standard Apple and Android browser, even on a fast Wi-Fi network. However, unlike on many phones today, the browser supports Adobe Flash on some pages, if you manually enable it. 
 
 Data Speeds 
 
 The Z10 is capable of using LTE networks, the most consistently speedy available. But on my test unit, which was running on AT&T, I could never achieve download speeds of more than a paltry 2 megabits a second, even though the phone said it was on LTE, which typically sports download speeds of 15, 20 or even more mbps. RIM had no explanation for this anomaly. 
 
 Video Chats 
 
 In BB10, RIM has added a video-chat feature similar to Apple's FaceTime. In my tests, this worked well. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Research in Motion The BlackBerry Z10 comes in black and white and looks very different from past BlackBerrys. 
 
 Cloud 
 
 Unlike Android or Apple devices, BB10 has no built-in cloud system for syncing or storing photos or other data. RIM says that the third-party cloud app Box, which is mainly used by corporate customers, can do some automatic syncing, but it says it plans to work on its own system over time. 
 
 Other Downsides 
 
 There is no native ability to print from the Z10. And in some cases, I found that common controls required too many steps. For instance, to quickly get to the top or bottom of a long list of messages in the Hub—something the old BlackBerry did with ease—you have to go to the menu. RIM says it is working on making that quicker. 
 
 Bottom Line 
 
 The Z10 and BB10 represent a radical reinvention of the BlackBerry. The hardware is decent and the user interface is logical and generally easy to use. I believe it has a chance of getting RIM back into the game, if the company can attract a lot more apps. 
 
 —Find all of Walt Mossberg's columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com. ||||| The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry’s 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone’s vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front). 
 
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 The thin, sleek, black BlackBerry has 16 gigabytes of storage, plus a memory card slot for expansion. Its textured back panel pops off easily so that you can swap batteries. It will be available from all four major carriers — Verizon , AT&T , Sprint and T-Mobile — and Verizon said it would charge $200 with a two-year contract. 
 
 Some of BlackBerry 10’s ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you. Without even pressing a physical button, you swipe up the screen; the Lock screen lifts like a drape as you slide your thumb, revealing what’s underneath. It’s fast and cool. 
 
 There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub — a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. It’s a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense. 
 
 The BlackBerry’s big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10. 
 
 But you might not need it. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. Stay with me here: 
 
 As you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys — guesses as to the word you’re most likely to want. If you’ve typed “made of sil,” for example, the word “silicone” appears over the letter I key, “silver” over the V, and “silk” over the K. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key — or ignore it and keep typing. 
 
 How well does it work? In this passage, the only letters I actually had to type are shown in bold. The BlackBerry proposed the rest: “I’m going to have to cancel for tonight. There is a really good episode of Dancing With the Stars on.” 
 
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 I type 20 characters; it typed 61 for me. 
 
 But wait, there’s more. The more you use the BlackBerry, the more it learns your way of writing. When I tried that same passage later, I typed only one letter: the I in “I’m.” Thereafter, the phone predicted each successive word in those sentences, requiring no letter-key presses at all. Freaky and brilliant and very, very fast. 
 
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 There’s speech recognition, too. Hold in the Play/Pause key to get the Z10’s Siri-like assistant. Siri-like in concept, that is — you can say “send an e-mail to Harvey Smith,” “schedule an appointment” and a few other things — but it’s slower, less accurate and far narrower in scope. You can also speak to type, but the accuracy is so bad, you won’t use it. 
 
 The camera software is terrific. One feature, Time Shift, is mind-blowing. You take a photo of people — then, with your finger on a face, you can dial forward or backward up to two seconds in time, seeking that perfect expression. You repeat with the next face, and the next, until you’ve dialed up the perfect fraction of a second, independently, for each person in the shot. Admit it: that’s brilliant. 
 
 The BlackBerry 10 neatly solves a huge problem for corporate techies: how to keep employees’ work phones secure in a world where people also use their phones for personal things. If a company has BlackBerry’s corporate software suite, separate worlds can be created on each phone: personal and work, with distinct calendars, address books, wallpaper and even app collections. They appear together — but without the work password, only the personal stuff is visible. 
 
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 When the employee leaves the company, one stroke deletes the whole corporate or personal half. 
 
 The popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service now lets you make free phone calls and video calls over the Internet. You can even screencast — share what you’re doing on your screen with your conversation partner, like a map, an app or a photographic snap. (BlackBerry 10 required; older BlackBerry models can use BBM only for texts.) 
 
 Thanks to NFC (near-field communication), you can shoot a photo, map, Web page, app, file or song to another BlackBerry 10 owner, wirelessly, on the spot. Other phones do NFC sharing, but rarely as simply. 
 
 There are some missteps. There’s no physical silencer switch (only a software function). In the Mail app, you can’t move from one message to the next without returning to the in-box in between. The calendar views don’t rotate when you turn the phone, and you can’t drag appointments to reschedule them. When you’ve used the faux Siri to dictate a message or e-mail, you can’t edit it, even manually. And the battery barely makes it through a day. 
 
 But the usual Achilles’ heel for a new type of smartphone is the apps. Who could catch up with the 750,000 apps available for iPhone or Android? (The BlackBerry Z10 doesn’t run older BlackBerry apps.) 
 
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 Incredibly, BlackBerry says that there will be 70,000 apps available on Day 1. The company shrewdly wrote a utility program that can convert Android apps, making it simple for programmers to adapt their wares. 
 
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 That’s a well-stocked salad bar, but it’s not the whole grocery. Most of the big-name apps are already there ( Skype , Yelp , Twitter, Spotify, Foursquare, Dropbox , Angry Birds and so on), but a few important ones are still missing: Netflix , Draw Something, Pinterest , Hipstamatic, Instagram and most airline and bank apps. 
 
 Those apps will surely materialize if BlackBerry 10 is a success. The question is, Will it be one? 
 
 The software is simple to master, elegantly designed and surprisingly complete. It offers features nobody else offers, some tailored to the corporate world that raised BlackBerry aloft in its glory days. 
 
 Remember, too, that 80 million people still carry BlackBerrys, and many have a deep love for the BlackBerry Way. 
 
 On the other hand, wow, is this horse late to the race. The BlackBerry music, movie and app stores are just getting under way. If you choose BlackBerry over iPhone or Android, you give up some very attractive ecosystems, like the way Apple synchronizes your calendar, messages, and photos on all your gadgets. Or, for Android, the similar conveniences of Google Voice and Google Maps. 
 
 These days, excellence in a smartphone isn’t enough. Microsoft’s phone is terrific, too, and hardly anyone will touch it. 
 
 So then, is the delightful BlackBerry Z10 enough to save its company? 
 
 Honestly? It could go either way. But this much is clear: BlackBerry is no longer an incompetent mess — and its doom is no longer assured. ||||| On January 30, 2013, RIM (Research in Motion) announced that the company will officially be known as BlackBerry. 
 
 Members of the BlackBerry Faithful, meet your new phone. The BlackBerry Z10 has everything you've been waiting for: a sleek, modern, and professional touch-screen body with an up-to-date OS to match and 4G LTE support. You'll revel in the virtual keyboard's ease and in BlackBerry Messenger's seamless voice chats. You'll crow about the Z10's Micro-HDMI port, and enjoy the 8-megapixel camera with its built-in editing tools. 
 
 In the most important ways, everything comes together: a lovely HD screen, a fast processor, a camera (with tricks!) that's good enough to stand alongside those of the big boys. 
 
 Slip off the RIM-colored glasses, though, and you won't be able to ignore the minor hardware and OS irritations that nevertheless pile up as you use the Z10 over time -- like having to use an antiquated and unintuitive file system to create a new photo album, and a basic mapping app that can't possibly stand up to Google's best-in-show. For their part, BlackBerry detractors will plainly see a poor iPhone clone that offers little more than the usual features found in any present-day OS worth its salt. 
 
 If you're game to learn a few navigational gestures and your bigger-picture mentality lets you see beyond annoyances, you should feel justified buying the BlackBerry Z10. However, if you're happy with your current platform, there's no need to budge unless or until RIM patches up some OS holes. 
 
 The BlackBerry Z10 goes on sale January 31 in the U.K., February 5 in Canada ($149.99 on contract), and February 10 in the UAE. AT&T; sells the smartphone, beginning March 22 for $199 on contract (about $599 unlocked). Verizon will carry the Z10 for $199 in both black and also white, an exclusive for them. T-Mobile will also sell the Z10, but Sprint will skip it in favor of the keyboarded BlackBerry Q10. 
 
 Editors' note: You may also be interested in our full review of the BlackBerry 10 operating system. 
 
 Verizon is home to the exclusive white version of the BlackBerry Z10. (Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) 
 
 Design and build 
 
 At first glance, the handsome BlackBerry Z10 looks suspiciously like Apple's black iPhone 5: tall and narrow, with straight edges that meet at rounded corners, and a roughly 4-inch screen. Like the iPhone 5, the Z10 is adept at one-handed operation. That's where the similarities end. 
 
 You see, the Z10 has no navigation buttons, either physical or capacitive. Instead, you'll operate the Z10 through gestures (more on those later). The phone stands 5.1 inches tall, 2.6 inches wide, and 0.35 inch thick -- only slightly deeper than the iPhone 5. Its 4.8-ounce weight feels right with the phone's proportions, and the device has a much more comfortable grip than the iPhone, thanks to the slightly rounded edges on the back and a lightly textured, soft-touch finish. 
 
 The BlackBerry Z10 (left), resembles the iPhone 5, at least in shape. (Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) 
 
 Of the two phones, the iPhone undeniably has the more solid, premium, and precise build quality. Its seams are as narrow as possible, and its details are finely machined. For those who care about such things, the iPhone 5's material quality trumps the Z10's treated plastics and loose back panel that too easily pops out when I slide a nail anywhere along its perimeter. 
 
 Larger than the iPhone 5 overall, the Z10's shape still fits neatly into pockets (I use my back pockets for trips around the office and the neighborhood). However, it feels uncomfortably flat when I wedge it between my shoulder and my ear. And yes, this is precisely why many people use a wireless headset. 
 
 In between the BlackBerry Z10's volume buttons is the voice control key. (Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) 
 
 On its face, the Z10's 4.2-inch LCD display has a 1,280x768-pixel WXGA HD resolution (that's 355 pixels per inch; the iPhone 5 has a 326ppi density.) You'll see fine lettering, crisp edges, and deep colors. I did notice, though, that with both handsets set to maximum brightness, the iPhone 5 outshone the Z10, and an HD picture of a flower looked brighter, more detailed, and had more color variation on Apple's device. On the whole, the differences between the two are minimal. The bezel surrounding the screen is frankly wider than today's edge-to-edge fashion, but this doesn't personally bother me. 
 
 Above the display are the array of sensors, the notification LED, and the 2-megapixel front-facing camera. The right spine houses Up and Down volume controls, with a button in the center that serves as a voice command trigger you can also use to pause music. If you simultaneously press both volume buttons, you'll take a screenshot. If you're in camera mode, pressing either one snaps a picture. 
 
 Few smartphones can claim an HDMI port, but the Z10 is one of them. (Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) 
 
 On the Z10's left edge are the Micro-HDMI port and Micro-USB port. The placement of the latter pretty much guarantees that the charging cord gets in my way. Up top, you'll find the power/lock button and the 3.5 millimeter headset jack -- you'll hold down the start button for a 3-second countdown to turn off the phone. On the back are the camera lens with LED flash, and a BlackBerry icon that matches up with the NFC antenna on the opposite side of the back panel. 
 
 Also underneath that panel are the tall, narrow battery (I wonder if there was room for larger?) and a microSD card slot. The Z10 comes preloaded with a 8GB class 2 microSD card. That's good, right? It would be if the card supported the camera's option to capture 1080p HD video. As a result, you'll shoot video in 720p HD if you don't switch out the card to class 4 or higher. 
 
 BlackBerry 10 OS 
 
 Here's what you need to know about the new BlackBerry 10 OS: it looks cool, it's gesture-driven, and it'll take you at least a few minutes to pick up. In some ways it's quite advanced -- I'm a fan of BlackBerry Balance and the virtual keyboard -- and in other ways, you wonder what RIM's been doing all these years. 
 
 RIM's new smartphone OS throws out buttons in favor of navigational gestures. (Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 My full review of the BlackBerry 10 OS goes deep: into the layout, gestures, the Hub, maps, music, the keyboard, the browser...and that's the beginning. For more on the OS, I highly recommend skipping on over to the BlackBerry 10 OS review. But don't worry, I'll still give you a flavor of what to expect right here on these pages. 
 
 Features and apps 
 
 When it comes to multiple accounts and a unified inbox, BlackBerry 10 delivers. You can sign into multiple e-mail accounts and social networks, and populate your address book and calendar from these cross-pollinated networks. I didn't see contact duplicates, and my buddies' addresses also appeared neatly sorted in the maps app, basically the only really nice surprise there. 
 
 You'll find Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and all the good stuff when it comes to texting, chatting with other BlackBerry users, and sharing stuff to social networks. There's a good music app, a basic maps app, and the mostly-good Documents To Go, which opens the door to reading, creating, and editing Word and Excel documents, and viewing PowerPoint and Adobe PDF files. 
 
 Twitter and Facebook for BlackBerry 10 OS. (Credit: Screenshot by Jaymar Cabebe/CNET) 
 
 For your social networking apps, the BlackBerry serves up a healthy spoonful of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. And yes, these are real apps, not just links to mobile Web sites masquerading as apps. You know what is, though? YouTube. I'm looking forward to a full-fledged app from them. 
 
 In addition to the social apps, you'll find a notes program, an alarm clock with special bedtime mode (it shuts off alerts, but don't hold your breath for lullabies). There's Flixster, Box, and Dropbox, the awesome Angry Birds Star Wars, Slacker Radio, and in my review unit, quite a lot of Canadian news, sports, and transportation apps. 
 
 You'll find downloadable programs, games, music, and shows in BlackBerry App World, and if you happen to listen to music while you browse, you can control it through a widget that pops up as a widget where you browse (left). (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 More content is close at hand in BlackBerry World, where you can browse by apps, games, music, videos, and TV shows. Rovio powers the shows, while longtime partner 7 Digital handles the music. Strangely, you can search for top paid apps, but there aren't any filtering options specifically for free programs. 
 
 BlackBerry Balance and business use 
 
 Business and security-conscious users have long been RIM's bread and butter. The BlackBerry Z10 serves this demographic well with BlackBerry Balance, which helps separate sensitive business apps from your personal ones, with the help of your corporate IT manager. There are privacy settings and RIM's signature encrypted servers, plus parental controls -- not to mention remote wiping with BlackBerry Protect. 
 
 With the Z10, RIM takes aim at both individual consumers looking for a smart new device and business professionals who could easily pass this phone to an IT administrator to get work-approved apps. The thing is, in today's climate of bring-your-own-phone, many businesses can get by with little extra security and have abandoned fleets of devices. Having been out of the game for so long, it could be a hard sell. 
 
 Cameras and video 
 
 For a long time now, the BlackBerry camera has been a weak spot. No longer. The Z10 packs a respectable 8-megapixel shooter in the back and a 2-megapixel lens up front. Both record 720p HD video, and the larger of the two can also shoot 1080p HD video. 
 
 The Z10's camera took some bright, zingy outdoor shots. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 Here's the flower in full resolution, cropped but otherwise untouched. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 The main camera comes with autofocus, 5x digital zoom, and options for burst mode and stabilization. Pressing either volume button can snap a shot. TimeShift mode takes an array of photos, and lets you revisit them along a timeline to pick the one you like best. There are scene modes (like action and night) and you can choose to take pictures in a 3:4 or 9:16 ratio. (For more on TimeShift, see the full BlackBerry 10 OS review.) 
 
 Whatever he's doing, CNET editor Jaymar Cabebe is most definitely not posing for the camera. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 Although there's autofocus, focusing elsewhere isn't intuitive. Touching the screen anywhere triggers the shutter, so you'll just have to know to drag the focal bracket around the screen. 
 
 Jaymar at full resolution. You can easily see a ton of noise. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 Budding photographers will also notice scant options and controls. There's no HDR, no ISO settings, no grid, no geotagging, no option to drop resolution, and -- one of its worst offenses in my opinion -- no way to silence the shutter's loud clacking. 
 
 I've heard phone makers argue that most casual users don't need features overkill, but I submit that it's nice to have, especially if you'd like phone owners to leave the dSLR at home and use your phone as their camera instead. 
 
 You can make out the individual furs in this cute plushy, shot indoors. (Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET) 
 
 Despite the thin toolset, image quality was pretty decent. Naturally, photos looked better outside than inside, where there was plenty of ambient light and where I could hold the image steady. Some pictures looked very noisy in full resolution, but other times, the Z10's camera picked up more detail than some others; for instance, in one comparison photo I took with an HTC Droid DNA.
– BlackBerry is betting its bottom dollar on the BlackBerry Z10, the first phone to bear its radically redesigned new BlackBerry 10 OS. So how does it stack up? Critics generally like it, but worry that it's not enough to save the company. Here's what people are saying: David Pogue used to think BlackBerry was doomed. "I was wrong," he writes in today's New York Times. The Z10 is "lovely, fast, and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas." It may lack Blackberry's signature physical keyboard, but its "mind-bogglingly clever typing system," which positions word predictions over the next letter you'd naturally type is "freaky and brilliant and very, very fast." The package is good enough to give BlackBerry a fighting chance. "On the other hand, wow, is this horse late to the race." "I would expect the handset to mostly appeal to the legions of BlackBerry fans that, judging by the pre-launch interest, are still out there," writes Edward Baig at USA Today. "BlackBerry very much has its bread-and-butter business customers in its sights," with excellent security features, and a pre-installed Documents to Go app that can create, edit, and view Microsoft Office and PDF files. But the new "user interface is so different that it will seem foreign to longtime BlackBerry users," warns Walt Mossberg, who seems generally unimpressed in the Wall Street Journal. "It worked fine in my tests, but I found it a work in progress," lacking its competitors' app selection, cloud ecosystems, and other features. "In the most important ways, everything comes together: a lovely HD screen, a fast processor, a camera (with tricks!) that's good enough to stand alongside the big boys," CNET's editors write. But "the Z10's unintuitive gesture paradigm creates a learning curve, and a long list of OS inefficiencies and omissions sour the experience."