BlackBerry Z10 review

FUN TIME

It’s not all about work and web browsing, though. The BlackBerry Z10 has built-in music and video playback apps, and you can use the Story Maker app to stitch together videos and photos, overlay effects and music and make a short film. It’s an impressive camera, with very well-judged exposure and accurate colours, but not quite as much detail as in the Samsung Galaxy S3’s pictures. The S3 remains our benchmark smartphone camera.

We didn’t like having to use BlackBerry Link to copy music to the phone

However, we struggled to make the Z10 into an effective media player. The music and video playback apps are fine, but unlike with Android and Windows Phone 8 (but not 7) you can’t just drag and drop music and video files onto the phone’s storage in Windows. Instead, you have to install BlackBerry Link on your PC, and use that to copy across music. At first the application refused to copy any music files across, but after an uninstall, a failed reinstall, a restart and another reinstall, we got it to work. It’s almost as fiddly as iTunes, and we wish manufacturers would just get rid of desktop synchronisation applications entirely.

We like BlackBerry 10 OS but, as with any new mobile operating system, whether you’ll get on with it depends to a large extent if there are any particular apps you can’t do without. There’s a BBC iPlayer app, but this just links straight to the mobile BBC iPlayer site. In fairness, video playback through the site does work perfectly, with none of the fiddling about installing media packs as you have to do on Android.

The iPlayer app just links to the BBC iPlayer Mobile website, but this at least works perfectly

BlackBerry 10 OS also has a good free TrainTimes app and an excellent free Tube map, but there’s nothing to compare to the excellent travel apps available on iOS and Android, or which Nokia provides for free with its Lumia handsets. We paid 75p for A+ London, which miserably failed to plan a journey to anywhere.

We’re impressed with BlackBerry 10 OS. It’s not yet quite as smooth and slick as its competitors, but has some clever ideas and excels for messaging. There’s also better app support than we were expecting, but whether people continue to support the platform remains to be seen.

The Z10 is also a fine handset to show off the new operating system; it’s not pretty, but its bright display and excellent build quality make it a pleasure to use. The main problem is the handset’s price. A Samsung Galaxy S3 is cheaper on contract, and is a faster, more desirable phone overall, even if it can’t match the BlackBerry for messaging. If you’re a true mobile email warrior, though, the BlackBerry Z10 could be for you.