BlackBerry Z10 review

TYPING HEAVEN

The excellent messaging centre is complemented by the Z10’s impressive keyboard. The accurate and responsive touchscreen makes it easy to hit the right key, and there’s no discernible lag between pressing a key and the phone responding. It’s one of the best keyboards we’ve used, but this isn’t the Z10’s only trick; the phone guesses what word you’re currently typing and displays it above the next key it thinks you’re going to hit, and you just have to swipe up on the key to choose that word. We found we only used this feature for longer words, but it should save some time when you get used it.

The keyboard is responsive and accurate, with a useful prediction facility

Other productivity apps are as you’d expect. The phone can view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and you can create Word and Excel documents from scratch. We had no problems setting up the phone to synchronise contacts, calendar and email with Hotmail, Gmail and our corporate Exchange server, and the calendar is clear with useful week and agenda views.

The Z10 has a 1,280×768-pixel screen, which is unusual compared to the 1,280×720-pixel displays we’re used to seeing among Android smartphones. This resolution means the screen is slightly squarer than 720p displays, but we found it fine for viewing desktop web pages without having to zoom in.

The screen is also seriously bright, and we had no problems reading it outdoors, even at medium brightness. The screen’s high brightness didn’t seem to impact its performance in our video playback benchmark, though, where the phone managed a huge 13h 59m. However, we weren’t so impressed with the phone’s battery in everyday use. With the Z10 set up to sync with three email accounts and with Wi-Fi on, it barely lasted a day in normal use. Most Android phones need charging every day, but if you need the Z10 to last into an evening out you’ll need to give it a top-up along the way.

The handset completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 1,724ms, which is around average. It certainly didn’t have any problems rendering web pages quickly, but we noticed an occasional stutter when zoomed in and panning around pages as the browser rendered images. The phone generally feels fast, but some of the options menus feel jerky and slow, which detracts from the overall slick experience.