Z10 Review

Blackberry Z10 & Q10

Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry smart phone, has made some spectacularly wrongheaded moves in the six years since Apple announced its first iPhone. It said the iPhone wasn’t a game changer and claimed that apps don’t matter. It’s grafted new features like touch input onto its aging operating system in ways that didn’t please anyone. It’s wasted time it didn’t really have to spare on a misbegotten tablet.

But in April 2010, RIM did something deeply sensible: it acquired QNX, the maker of a highly regarded, industrial-strength operating system used for applications such as car electronics and medical devices. It then set out to build all-new BlackBerry phones built on top of QNX’s plumbing — a project so ambitious that it wasn’t the least bit startling that it took years and involved multiple delays.

And now, at long last, that 2010 decision has a shot at paying off.

Last week, RIM began its press event in New York City by announcing news that was simultaneously shocking and logical: it was changing its name to BlackBerry, bringing its corporate branding in line with its much more famous product. Then it unveiled the first two phones running BlackBerry 10, its new QNX-based platform. The BlackBerry Z10 is a full-touch model that goes on sale in some countries this month; it’ll show up in the U.S. on AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in March. (Only Verizon has announced a price so far: $199 with a two-year contract.) The BlackBerry Q10, which sports the iconic BlackBerry physical QWERTY keyboard, will arrive later this year.

I’ve spent the past few days with a Z10 review unit provided by BlackBerry. The phone isn’t the sort of reality-defying, epoch-shifting landmark BlackBerry would have needed to silence its critics and lure teeming masses of skeptical iPhone and Android fans. It needs more high-profile apps, additional features to set it apart from other smart phones and fewer gnarly bugs.

But you know what? In multiple ways, it’s already better than I expected it to be. Behind the scenes, BlackBerry has been building a mobile operating system that’s fresh, fun and functional. It’s put the software on a handset that’s recognizable both as a current smart phone and as a BlackBerry — just the sort of thing it desperately needed to keep remaining BlackBerry loyalists from defecting.

The Z10 feels modern in part because it’s the first BlackBerry in years that isn’t based on outdated hardware. Its 4.2-in. screen is midsize by 2013 standards; the 1280-by-768 resolution gives it an eyeball-pleasing density of 356 pixels per inch, a skosh better than the iPhone 5. It’s got an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel one on the front for video calls, a zippy dual-core processor, LTE 4G wireless broadband and 16GB of storage with a MicroSD slot for expansion.

The industrial design, while not exceptional, is nice. The phone is .35-in. thick, but the bedimpled plastic back pops off so you can replace the battery. (Which you may well want to do: after a day of use, I found that the battery gauge was usually dangerously close to empty.)

Modern phones, of course, aren’t defined by their hardware. All that plastic, metal and silicon is just a container for software and services. And while BlackBerry 10 isn’t really the 10th version of the BlackBerry operating system — it won’t run programs written for any previous version — it works hard to update some of the concepts that once made BlackBerrys so successful.

Back in the 1990s, the very first RIM devices weren’t smart phones — they were smart pagers, and their defining application was the first really powerful e-mail service you could put in your pocket. E-mail and other methods of textual communications have remained core to the BlackBerry experience ever since, an emphasis that doesn’t change in BlackBerry 10.

You do much of your communicating in the BlackBerry Hub, an überapp that stitches together e-mail, phone calls, updates from social services such as Facebook and Twitter, text messaging and BlackBerry Messenger, which now does video calls and screen sharing as well as instant messaging. The BlackBerry folks envision the Hub as a timesaver that will reduce the need to bounce around from separate app to separate app; in fact, they don’t even provide a dedicated home button to get you to BlackBerry 10′s home-screen grid of app icons. (You reach it by swiping up and to the right, a gesture that’s easy enough once you remember it.)

The BlackBerry Hub is well done, but the Z10 wouldn’t be nearly so slick a communicator if it weren’t for its on-screen keyboard. It’s the best stock keyboard I’ve ever seen on a touch-screen smart phone — a smart successor to the clicky little physical keys on most BlackBerrys of yore.

As with an iPhone or Android handset, you can tap to type, a process that benefits from such niceties as number keys that sit in a row atop the alphanumeric ones and gestures like the ability to swipe the backspace key to delete an entire word. But the BlackBerry 10 keyboard uses predictive technology to let you type without tapping. As you type, the operating system displays its best guess for the word you’re planning to enter on the spacebar, letting you complete it with one touch. It also wedges other word possibilities in between the letters on the on-screen keyboard. You can select any of them by flicking a word upward — whereupon the software may show its guesses about the next word you intend to type.

I found that mastering all this wasn’t a cakewalk: the word suggestions are displayed in tiny, low-contrast type that’s tough to read, and I’m used to typing as fast as my thumbs can muster, which tends to cover the suggestions. But with a little squinting and adjustment to my habits, the keyboard let me get text into e-mail and other applications at a remarkably speedy clip.

A feature called BlackBerry Balance, also available on the PlayBook tablet, caters to a traditional BlackBerry fan base: corporate IT people. Using BlackBerry’s server software, they can divvy the operating system into two separate-but-equal environments — one for personal stuff and one for work stuff. Each can have its own set of e-mail accounts, apps and other items, and a company can enforce security measures such as preventing an employee from cutting and pasting corporate data into a personal e-mail account.

Beyond all these classically BlackBerryesque touches, the company has packed BlackBerry 10 with other apps. It’s built camera software with a mind-bending feature — somewhat similar to one in some Samsung phones — that lets you snap a group portrait, then move individual faces backward and forward through two seconds’ worth of time until everyone is smiling and has open eyes. There’s a little tool for composing multimedia shows, a note-taker called Remember and a voice-powered assistant akin to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now. The company has also put together decent on-phone storefronts for music, movies, TV shows and magazines.

It’s easy to find spots where these offerings are shallower than their iPhone and Android counterparts — the map app and voice assistant are both minimalist compared with the competition. But there are also plenty of instances of the bundled apps going beyond the basics; the Web browser, for instance, has a streamlined reader review that’s comparable to the one in Apple’s Safari.

And then there are third-party apps and games — an impressive-sounding 70,000 of them at launch, the company says. Plenty of high-profile contenders are already in the BlackBerry World store or on their way: Documents to Go, Dropbox, Facebook, Foursquare, Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, Kindle, LinkedIn, Rdio, Skype, Twitter, Where’s My Water and others.

Appwise, it’s probably the most impressive haul ever for an operating-system debutante. And yet, there’s no way for a brand-new platform to come anywhere close to rivaling Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, both of which boast hundreds of thousands of programs. Among the high-profile apps and games that aren’t (yet) on BlackBerry 10: Bejeweled, Flipboard, Hipstagram, Hulu Plus, Instagram, Netflix, Temple Run and YouTube. Evernote is also missing, although BlackBerry’s own Remember app is similar and provides access to Evernote notebooks.

The more I dug around in BlackBerry World, the less giddy I was over the count of 70,000 apps. Some of the lesser known wares I sampled were crude conversions of PlayBook or Android apps that weren’t so hot in the first place. Quantity is fine, but what BlackBerry World needs most of all is quality.

Other than the app situation, the biggest telltale signs that BlackBerry is rushing to play catch-up with iPhone and Android are the bugs and other raw edges that remain. It’s no shocker that they’re there — even Apple’s iOS, the most polished mobile operating system, still gets a tad erratic when it undergoes a major upgrade — but they’re irritating evidence that BlackBerry could have used even more time to wrap up BlackBerry 10.

Some of the glitches I ran into:

• At one point, almost all the features in the browser — like the ability to share pages — refused to recognize my gestures. (They started paying attention again once I rebooted the phone.)
• The operating system periodically froze altogether for a few seconds, and back buttons didn’t always function.
• Remember, the Evernote-like note-taker, is a mess — it referred to calendar items by cryptic monikers like “appointment_19343″ and kept redownloading the same photos from Dropbox every time I opened the app.
• When I tried to use PayPal to pay for apps and movies, the phone not only wouldn’t accept it but also spit up cryptic error messages that didn’t seem to be designed for consumption by human beings at all.

Major operating systems may get all the attention, but minor ones can matter at least as much. If a thoroughly debugged BlackBerry 10.1 comes along soon, it would make the Z10 much easier to recommend.

Even then, the new, improved BlackBerry could turn out to be a noble failure. It’s not clear that the mobile market has room for a another solidly successful operating system beyond iOS and Android: Palm’s Palm Pre was bursting with promise but never went anywhere, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone is admirable but not yet popular.

So if you still think BlackBerry is toast, that’s your prerogative, and you could be right. We’ll see.

Still, the company that’s releasing the Z10 can no longer be dismissed as an embarrassingly out-of-touch outfit hobbled by an obsolete operating system. It’s not going to trounce the iPhone and Android, but it has a shot at re-establishing itself as a scrappy underdog with a viable platform. Even that would count as a surprise comeback for a company that so many have written off for so long.

techland.time.com

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What is a PC?

IBM PC 1981

The question that makes up the title of this post was the very same question that led a post written by my colleague Harry roughly a year ago.

Harry’s post cited a report by research firm Canalys that said tablets, which Canalys refers to as “pads,” made up 22% of worldwide PC sales during the fourth quarter of 2011. Yes, Canalys was counting tablets as PCs.

Fast forward to today, and Canalys has just released the numbers of PC sales for the fourth quarter of 2012. Still counting tablets as PCs, that 22% grew to 33%. Canalys also relays that “one in six PCs shipped in Q4 2012 was an iPad.”

This brings us back to the “What is a PC?” question. Last year, Harry informally surveyed his Twitter followers and found the following general consensus:

A PC runs apps. The owner gets to define the device’s capabilities by installing software on it–and, these days, by using it with Web-based services.

It’s a general-purpose device. You can use one to write a novel, balance a checkbook, listen to a symphony, design a jumbo jet or pretend you’re Batman. True, most people don’t use a single PC for quite so dizzying an array of tasks–but they could.

It’s designed principally for use by one person at a time. That’s where the “personal” in “personal computer” comes in. It’s a computer for you, which was a pretty radical notion when the PC first got going in the mid-1970s, and still a liberating one.

It can be of any size. Which means that smartphones are PCs, since they run general-purpose software and are generally used by one person. In an era of products such as Samsung’s Galaxy Note, which is as much tablet as phone, I see no reason to declare that something isn’t a PC simply because it fits (just barely) into a pocket.

I’d say that consensus still holds up today, and I’d add that as each year passes, we’ll probably put less and less effort into trying to define what constitutes a personal computer and what doesn’t. Though some have argued that we’re in the “post-PC” era, I’d argue the so-called era to be a short one. “Post-PC” simply acts as a temporary phrase used to differentiate between a box on your desk or something with a hinge on your lap, a slab you poke at with your finger or a smaller slab you poke at with your finger and that fits in your front pocket and can make phone calls.

But in the not-too-distant future, if you’re using a personal device that computes things, it’s not going to matter what you call it. It might not even be referred to as a PC or a tablet or a smartphone. Within the next 10 years or so, my bet’s on each person carrying a single highly portable, super powerful device that docks into inexpensive desktop, laptop, tablet, TV, car dashboard and smartphone shells, depending upon the usage scenario. One tiny computer that can shape-shift as needed: that’s the definition of the PC I want.

techland.time.com

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Sony Playstation Review

From wishful thinking to shockingly sudden all-but-certainty, Sony‘s next game system may be here at last (I’ll try to avoid calling it things Sony hasn’t, like “PlayStation 4″ or “Orbis”), apparently head-faking Microsoft to debut earlier than expected at what’ll no doubt be a media circus in New York (and online) come Feb. 20.

The event invite cleared my inbox last night accompanied by, well, see for yourself in Sony’s slick dubstep tease above. Sony labeled the event “PlayStation Meeting,” which is sort of like calling E3 “L.A. Occurrence,” but, well, marketing.

At this point, your guess would have been as good as mine: probably the next PlayThing, because what else is Sony going to hype for three weeks and drag folks to from all corners of the earth? Still, I could have flown around the room on a broomstick: a PlayStation VitaPad, a PlayStation Phone (pPhone!), or heck, even Sony’s answer to Google‘s Project Glass (Sony GlassStation!).

But no, the Wall Street Journal went and spoiled the fun by claiming that, yes indeed, Sony’s going to give us a peek at its next games console and ship the thing later this year, probably around the holidays. I consider that slightly more plausible than hearsay since it’s the Journal, but bear in mind it’s still a claim based on unidentified sources (the Journal pulls the phrase “people familiar with the matter” off the shelf at least four times).

No surprise, the story’s taken off like a guy air-riding a horse, prompting a bunch of people to throw odd notions at the wall based on even sketchier sourcing. Instead of regaling you with tales of mystical multi-core processors pulling contextually meaningless speeds, why don’t we look back at some of the things I suspect we’d all agree Sony needs to do better the next time around.

Don’t launch at $500-$600. I still can’t imagine what Sony was thinking in 2006 (well, beyond “we can barely afford to build this franken-thing!”). Yes, everyone loved the PlayStation 2, and no, not enough to spend that kind of money on the PlayStation 3. No, I don’t know what the company ought to sell a new game console for, but I’ll refer you down the aisle to the Wii U: currently struggling at $300-$350. If Sony launches higher (and doesn’t include something like a free iPad), especially in a weak economy, it may find it’s looking for dance partners all over again.

(MORE: Are Weak Wii U Sales a Bellwether of Shifting Game Demographics?)

The new PlayStation Network (or whatever Sony rebrands it) needs to be seamless. None of this irritating “synchronizing trophies” business, waiting ages for features like background downloads or “cross-voice game chat is really coming!” except it’s really not. Also, while my lizard brain still sort of responds to the nerdy elegance of the PlayStation 3′s XrossMediaBar, after all these years there’s just something warmer and friendlier about Xbox LIVE. I have a roughly equal number of friends in both ecosystems, so it’s not that; I’ve just come to prefer navigating TV environments that feel a little less clinical. (The Journal says Sony’s new system is more social media-driven, so unless Sony’s launching a standalone answer to Facebook, I expect we’ll see the interface sporting newfangled riffs on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Google+/etc. integration.)

Resist the urge to go all three-ring-circus on us. Sitting through Sony/Microsoft pressers sometimes feels like watching Tim Meadows and Will Ferrell squeeze bottles of Cookie Dough Sport over their heads. Spare us the strobe lights and sizzle reels and maybe just level with us like we’re adults and not a bunch of Red Bull-amped teenage boys at a Lady Gaga concert.

Don’t make it all about the graphics. I mean sure, we all like pretty games, but 5x, 10x, 100x the PS3′s oomph…it’s now all kind of abstract and pointless given how sophisticated games already look today. I want to know what those extra cycles are going to do for me gameplay-wise, and I don’t mean visually, e.g. better “god-rays” or “subsurface scattering” or a gazillion bendable blades of grass. Can this thing sustain an artificially intelligent being that’d pass a Turing Test? And can you work that into a game that’s actually fun to play?

Don’t be the last kid to the party. Hello, stuff like Grand Theft Auto IV and Skyrim DLC. Microsoft scored coup after coup this round in terms of timed exclusive or outright exclusive content. And yes, I’m sure it cost the company a pretty penny, but gamers are going to go where the games they want to play live. If their sense is that’s not Sony, well, it’s not rocket science. And some of the dropped balls this round were doozies: Skyrim‘s one of the bestselling games of all time and it’s been out since November 2011. Bethesda just announced today that PS3 users can finally get their hands on the downloadable content in a few weeks, whereas Xbox 360 users have had at it for months.

techland.time.com

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Subscribe to Office 365

Two days ago, Microsoft formally launched the consumer version of its Office 2013 suite, which it first revealed last July. As usual with a new version of Office, there are little tweaks all over the place, many of which have to do with making the software more webby (you can easily save documents to SkyDrive online storage, so they’re available from any computer, phone or tablet) and touch-friendly (the interface has been slightly rejiggered to work better with touchscreen PCs, such as many Windows 8 machines).

But one of the biggest new twists in Office 2013 involves how you might end up paying for it. Microsoft is now offering a consumer version of its Office 365 service, which turns the suite from a shrinkwrapped product you pay for in one lump sum into a subscription service. And as you’ll see if you visit Office.com, it’s emphasizing this new Office-as-a-service over the conventional versions. (They remain available, although Microsoft has done away with previous versions that entitled you to install the suite on more than one computer.) It wants subscription Office to be the default Office.

Software companies certainly like the idea of turning their wares into services with ongoing fees: It’s a way of ensuring that customers don’t buy something once and then hold onto it, spurning upgrades indefinitely. (There are people who paid for Windows XP back in 2001 and have never given Microsoft another dime.)

But do you want to subscribe to Office? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but I’m going to try to point you in the right direction.

One question I’m not going to answer in this piece. though it deserves further examination: Do you need Office at all, given that the consumer versions of Google’s equivalent web-based apps are free? (Briefly, Google’s services are a workable alternative in a lot of cases, but Office is still a vastly richer, more capable collection of productivity software.)

With the new consumer version of Office 365, Microsoft has resisted its usual instinctive urge to offer a product in a multiplicity of versions that vary in subtle ways. Despite its name — Office 365 Home Premium — there’s just one version of Office 365 for home users. It costs either $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month, which covers up to five computers in a household. They can include Windows PCs and/or Macs; Microsoft isn’t releasing a new OS X version of Office just now, but Office 2011, the current Mac version, is part of the package.

Your money gets you…well, pretty much everything in Office you’re likely to want to use for personal stuff:

• All the major Office apps (which, for Windows, include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher) in downloadable form, with access to upgrades as they become available;
• 20GB of additional SkyDrive space, beyond the 7GB Microsoft offers for free;
• Office on Demand, a service that lets you stream full-blown Office to Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs that don’t have the suite installed;
• An hour of Skype calls (to landlines) each month.

If you’re trying to do the math on the deal, start by considering how many computers you plan to use Office with:

• For one PC, Office 365 is $100 per year
• Two PCs: $50 per PC per year
• Three PCs: $33 per PC year
• Four PCs: $25 per PC per year
• Five PCs: $20 per PC year

Then think about your particular situation:

“I have a bunch of computers and they all need Office.”

Office 365 delivers impressive bang for the buck. Even if you bought Office Home & Student — a basic version that includes fewer apps than Office 365 — paying for five copies of the the suite would cost you $700. You could use Office 365 on those five machines through 2019 for that price, and you’d be entitled to all the upgrades that came along. And if you bought five shrinkwrapped copies of Office Professional — the version most comparable to Office 365 Home Premium — you’d owe Microsoft $2,000, which is enough to pay for twenty years’ worth of Office 365.

“I want as much Office as possible.”

Until now, Microsoft has catered to price-conscious home users with stripped-down versions of Office. But Office 365 has Outlook, Publisher and Access. And depending on the number of PCs you have and your propensity to upgrade, it might still cost you less over time than a more basic shrinkwrapped edition.

“I want the latest features as fast as possible.”

The core of Office 365 is still a suite of great big conventional PC apps that require updating, not web-based services that always sport the newest features. But Microsoft says it’s going to release new stuff for Office 365 on an ongoing basis, giving subscribers additional capabilities without making them wait three years or so for a conventional upgrade.

“I’m upgrade-adverse.”

If you plan to buy Office and then run it into the ground, Office 365 and its free upgrades lose much of their appeal. Note, though, that you aren’t required to install new versions as they come along: You could stick with the old ones until you were ready to make the leap.

“You know, I basically need Word and Excel for one computer.”

A $139.99 copy of Office Home & Student will probably do you fine.

“I’m worried what will happen to my stuff if I stop subscribing.”

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has written a good post on this topic. It’s true that you should only subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium if you’re comfortable with the idea of paying Microsoft $100 a year for productivity software indefinitely. But if you cancel your subscription, you won’t lose the documents you created — just access to the full-blown Office apps. You’ll still be able to open your files in a boxed copy of Office, Microsoft’s Office Web Apps or an Office-compatible competitor such as Google Docs.

The bottom line: Depending on how many PCs you’ve got and how many Office apps you need, Office 365 Home Premium is anywhere from a respectable deal to an aggressively excellent one. If you’re happy with whatever version of Office you’re using now — or happy using something that isn’t Office — there’s no need to feel guilty if you don’t feel like considering Microsoft’s latest upgrade right now. But I think a lot of people who are ready to move to Office 2013 are going to decide that Microsoft has made the Office 365 proposition irresistible.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2013/01/30/office-365/#ixzz2JapoETEA

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