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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Blackberry? How do the new models rate? From the couple of reviews that I read, their new products seem good.

I picked up a Z10 a few days ago and have been using it as my primary (only) phone. I'll say that it has a ton of promise. It's perfectly snappy, the screen's resolution is stunning (although the colors aren't as good as what you'd get from an AMOLED phone), the automatic screen brightness always works perfectly, and the OS is great at just getting out of the way. That said, I feel like it's still a beta product.

From my own experience and from reading various forums, enabling encryption has a decent chance of putting your phone in a state where it will randomly and frequently reboot. At least, that's the theory; I'm in the process of disabling encryption now, so soon I should know whether that makes the reboots go away. Other than that, some of the setup is a bit weird, and other things just take some getting used to.

The app store (BlackBerry World) is a bit empty. I've found most of the apps that I need, but if you're looking for a specific app (especially anything from Google), prepare to be disappointed. I haven't started doing any development, but the docs generally look good, and I'm really excited to get my feet wet with Qt Quick on a phone. I think they made the right choice there, although I haven't actually gotten into it yet.

So, overall, I do think the Z10 has great potential. Something about the entire UI just feels respectful of the user; it stays out of the way and it almost always does exactly what I want it to do (unique in my personal experience with touch-based devices).

>the screen's resolution is stunning

The Z10 has a 1280x768 resolution on a 4.2 inch screen. That is a 355ppi pixel density. That is better than the iphone 5(326ppi) and Galaxy S3(306ppi). Samsung's S4 although is a different story.

I've been excited about high DPI for a long time; finally seeing it happen really does make me happy. There's just something unreal about seeing a thumbnail of Orbital's Blue Album cover (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Orbital_-_Blue...) rendered in a 1" square on my phone's display, and being able to see all the details in the rings on an image that size. Looking at the specs of the S4 screen (441 dpi, plus being AMOLED), I'm betting it blows away the Z10 by a fair margin. Progress is a wonderful thing.

I've been using a device for several months, and have been developing on BlackBerry 10 for even longer. It's a joy to use and develop for.

I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully. I'm able to rapidly prototype and make changes as needed. Having done a lot of Android development, I can say the BlackBerry development tools and methods are actually easier and better to use. I think iOS dev is still more mature though.

Sales for my app have been decent. I need to push out an update soon, and do some more marketing to help it out though.

As a user, the device is great. I'm running the release OS on a Dev Alpha B, but I'll be getting a limited edition device once I ship this prototype back. It's smooth, fast, and works the way I expect it too. Again, having several Android devices, I can say that that OS never worked quite the way I did.

Could you give more details as to how you develop with Python? Is it done via PySide? My impression was that you could only use C++/Qt, HTML5/JavaScript or Adobe AIR for BB10. I plan to get a Z10 soon with the intention to port an application from Windows Phone along the way. I was mentally preparing for C++, but if Python works good enough then I may skip C++ altogether (I did some small PySide apps in the past, but this time I'd like to learn QML).

There are two approaches to using any interpreter. One is to using python wrappers and existing python GUI toolikits simply by using the "official" QNX/Python hook entry point into the app lifecycle. [0]

The other is to go deeper and integrate with cascades UI and process messages between the QML/Qt framework and a python event loop. [1] Project going this route can be found at http://hg.microcode.ca/blackberry-py/src/

Other "semi-supported" interpreters include Lua and Erlang. [2] I'm sure someone has a ruby vm by now.

[0]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/bbx-python-direct-entry-point.htm...

[1]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/blackberry-tart-preview.html

[2]: https://github.com/blackberry

BlackBerry-Py is the project I'm currently using. More specifically, the Tart branch.

(Disclosure: I'm one of the lead contributors.)

>I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully.

Ah! If only you could code android apps in python. That is a plus for BB in my book.

I had the chance to play with a Z10 recently and I must say I was quite surprised by how polished the experience seemed.

a. The OS felt as responsive as Windows Phone and all the custom gesture recognition works as advertised(e.g. Peek).

b. The apps I used included Twitter, the Blackberry Hub (e-mail, contact etc.), the Camera app and Evernote. Of these, the Evernote app seemed to be a little rough (mainly UI glitches), but the rest worked well.

I haven't used the Developer Toolchain for QNX/BB10, but have friends who seem to think that it's not too bad. They are waiting for sales figures to decide whether or not they should think about releasing a BB10 app.

Off-topic: As someone who likes tinkering with things, hardware repair-ability is something I pay attention to. The Z10 is the most repairable phone out there according to iFixit (8/10): http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/BlackBerry+Z10+Teardown/13445...

From the user point of view I haven't used it much but it felts decent though not really convincing. From the dev point of view, it doesn't feel great from what I've seen, and people I know building mid-size projects for it are hating it with a passion.

So it's still rough and there's not much good will on the dev side.

Such a bullshit comment. First an offhand "feeling" based on zero experience then a hearsay slander without any real information or references.

The question was why BB10 is not in the list, and that was a quick answer from my POV.

If you want the long one: I do maintenance for older (OS4~7) BB apps so I have an interest in where the platform goes. I'm following the evolution of the new OS and SDK since the playbook to the alpha device and up to the Z10, but even after the bbconf workshops on webworks or the sessions on cascade I don't see a future for native dev on this platform, and most of our clients just want their android app ported to BB10.

From the dev perspective, I don't see a good ROI in deeply learning the platform, so I'll be happy with watching over the shoulders of the guys dealing with it. Hearsay is OK for me when I see the support tickets flying around. Like there is no simple way to have the scroll position of a listview in cascades...that's just crazy when so many apps will be managing lists.

As a user, I'm not in the target audience since they never bothered to add japanese input support, but I tried most of devices by pure curiosity.

I genuinely wonder what particular feature is so well executed that you wanted to dismiss my opinion. I've seen some feature here and there that aren't bad, the focus on gestures is distinctive and there is a definitive push for a "modern" feel...but I'm not a big fan of the swipe up/down gestures, as actual content can be found near these areas, and it conflicts with other operations (like drawing on the screen). Even the task switching is tiresome at times, as app order is not fully predictable (or you have an excelent memory)

Is there any aspect that is not decent but really great?

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