TechnesstivityBlackBerry 10 Smartphones To Hit Nigerian Market Same Time As US & Canada
At a media exclusive BlackBerry 10 demo this week, RIM hinted at the possibility of BlackBerry 10 smartphones hitting Nigeria at the same time as other priority markets in the world. The phones will be on the market after a global launch on January 30, 2013. Yes, the global launch includes Nigeria.
There will be two BlackBerry 10 smartphones at launch. One smartphone will be a full touchscreen experience and the other will be a hybrid smartphone like the BlackBerry Bold 9900.
The demo in Lagos highlighted features of the BlackBerry 10 OS. A lot of these features are built on swipe gestures and RIM has obviously put in a lot of work and built this from the ground up.
For example swiping on the device from the bottom up will wake it from sleep and take you right to your apps. You can then swipe from left-to-right and vice versa to open apps.
To view what apps are running, users will be required to switch to the far left view of the apps screen where you can see exactly what is going on in your background apps. Social changes like a new BBM display name can be viewed on this screen. You don’t have to open apps up to view updates in them. Reminds us of live tiles in Windows Phone.
The messages app has also been replaced with a new “BlackBerry Hub” allowing you view social updates and messages as well as filter through them.
As for the keypad, RIM wowed us with its “next word prediction on keypad” feature. The keypad predicts words you’re about to type on the next letter you wish to type. You then swipe the word up and fill them into the text field. To switch from the qwerty keypad to the number and symbols view, you just swipe down. RIM says it noticed a lot of users on other smartphone keyboards had problems switching to the number view.
We were also wowed by the Camera app on BlackBerry 10. The Time-shift feature captures different frames of a photograph and lets you select which one is best. This is great for group photos as you can select appropriate faces for different individuals.
One of the biggest updates to BlackBerry 10 is the BlackBerry App World. The name is eventually going to change and the world will offer more content such as videos, music and TV shows. Whether or not they’ll be available to Nigeria is a copyright issue that other smartphone makers are still trying to solve.
We were really impressed by the features shown at the BlackBerry 10 demo and we’re looking forward to the launch in 2013. Are you?
