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Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

Not entirely related, but if you look closely at 0:50, you'll see that Apple's Mac OS X "Clownfish" desktop image appears prominently in the photo gallery.

That said, the OS looks much nicer than the previous release - at least, on par or a bit above the native Froyo components. I have a hard time getting past the hardware, though. There are tons of diehard BlackBerry users, but I'd have trouble bringing myself to use any of their devices in their current form. Even so, it's great to see that people have choice and that the UI/UX bar is rising on each of the most popular mobile platforms.

[edit: topical content added]

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A few comments about the BB user experience.

- The BB might as well be a text only device (in a good way). I love reading RSS feeds on it and doing email on it. It's fast, simple, uncluttered.

- As a phone the BB is well beyond the iPhone or Android. Want to set up rules for when your phone rings or stays silent? BB lets you do anything you need using a simple exceptions approach.

- The web experience has been really bad on the BB b/c of the slow processor. The video suggests this may be changing.

> The BB might as well be a text only device

The odd thing about this, to me, is that as text-centric as the Blackberry is, every single handset I've played with has had atrocious text rendering (with the last being a friend's Storm).

BB ships with a few very bad fonts, and the default font doesn't look good when reduced in size, so it's quite possible that you've seen customization gone awry.

> - The web experience has been really bad on the BB b/c of the slow processor. The video suggests this may be changing.

The old browser was a custom one written in Java. There is work underway to replace it with a WebKit one.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/16/rim-demos-new-webkit-base...

There's an app for that? Between locale (which allows you to set location-based ring preferences [e.g., do not ring while at the movie theater, but turn the ringer back on when my location is elsewhere]) and some other app whose name I can't remember (that lets you set positional ring-settings [like, if I place my phone face down on the desk, it won't ring, otherwise it will]) -- I don't know what else I might be missing.

I'm not at all familiar with recent Blackberries though, so if I'm ill-informed, please let me know.

Actually, it might have been Locale that did both of those tasks. I just looked over the feature listing, and apparently it can configure display, network settings, notification settings, ringtones, volume and wallpaper based on location, calender events, manual timers, contacts or battery / charging levels.

I don't see position, but uhhh, maybe?

that sounds like a great app!

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