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my unboxing and first look at the Blackberry zed1 so I'm going to open
this up with saying a big thanks to Bell Mobility here in Canada for providing me
with a Blackberry Zed 10 because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to
get my hands on this phone and as a Canadian I am extremely excited about
the Z 10 because it is one of those sort of you know you know Canadian company
not formerly Rim now Blackberry it's just kind of their their their last big
sort of kick at the Ken with Blackberry 10 and I'm really really excited to try
it out but the funny thing about trying it out is that I'm not actually going to
be the one trying it out doing our I switched 30-day trial with Blackberry 10
um is actually going to be Slick's responsibility so uh that'll be
interesting he's been a hardcore Android User for a long time and I'm I'm just
fascinated to see how this goes so Inside the Box we find not really a
whole lot there's little tiny
wallboard very very slim very uh very
stylish very small I mean personally I prefer if they ship a bigger wall wart
and it charges faster but as long as it you know charges the phone and charges
it adequately then I don't think we're going to have a problem here the USB port is on the side of it just like that
all right also included in the Box we've got some
documentation so start here which has
presumably some instructions because Blackberry 10 is all about gestures it's
about getting around with gestures there's no back button there isn't even
a home button there's not a single Hardware button on the phone so for
those of you who are used to iOS or used to Android devices where you do have
hard buttons it might be a bit of a thing to adapt to now I was one of those
few sort of you know demented people who
thought that the Blackberry playbook was awesome at the time and really enjoyed
the gesture-based navigation so maybe when Slick's done with the Z 10 I'll
spend some time with it and see what I think of that in more of
a of a smartphone like environment so the other things inside the Box are you
know nice long USB a to mini B cable for charging as well as a pair of headphones
although I'm not entirely convinced that anyone actually uses the uh headphon SL
headsets that are included with phones these days but there you go it's got a
single button so you can take your calls as well as a clip so you can clip it to
things and then what appear to be probably the most uncomfortable earbuds
ever um anyway that's not what you paid
good money for you paid good money for the zed10 phone so on the top of the
phone you're going to find your lock button as well as your headphone and
microphone Port so it's a 3 and 12 mm Jack I've actually powered up the phone
just now uh the Z1 has one of the brightest screens available on the
market with uh some guys measuring it as high as 700 CD perm squared which is
pretty much meant to be usable in direct sunlight the dis advantage to their the
way that they've implemented their screen brightness functionality is that
you actually cannot turn off auto brightness now this is one of the things
that bothered me immediately about Windows Phone 8 where some of the
decisions were being made for me for example in Windows Phone 8 it is
impossible to uh Auto to to lock the
auto rotate you can't do it it auto rotates no matter what and I'm looking
at this going really and then in iOS um
at least when back when I was using it maybe they've changed this now you were
only able to lock phones in portrait you couldn't lock them in landscape I'm like
why are you making these decisions for me why don't you let me make the decision whether I want to trade off
battery life or whether I want to trade off um screen brightness so so there you
go that's something that sort of doesn't appeal to me about it right off the bat
but you know since I'm not the one doing the I switched I won't be the one to
have any complaints about it I suppose on the side we find um micro HDMI as
well as a USB port for charging and then
on the bottom we've got what looks like like ah yes the pry spot to take off the
back plate so we'll we'll cover that in just a moment and then on the other side
we've got the volume rocker so on the back of the unit there's sort of a
chrome finish thing here I'm sure if you're watching this video you've probably seen uh a Blackberry Z 10 at
this point but there's the 8 megapixel rear camera as well as the Flash and
then on the front there's a 2 megapixel camera that is right about there now
I've had people complain oh look at that my screen turned off I've had people
complain about the finish of the back of the phone saying that it feels that it
feels cheap but I don't get that impression at all I mean let's be really
clear this is not the HTC1 this is not
like a beautiful one of the most beautifully anodized finished phones
I've ever encountered but it's also not
red that thing go it's also not a Galaxy S4 where it's like a glossy uh
scratchable piece of plastic on the back that actually feels quite flimsy even
compared to the zed10 so let's go ahead and pop the backing off of this one
where you can see it's just like it could be a butterfly if butterflies were
made of plastic and stuck to the back of phones whereas the one on the Z 10 which
I've already actually you know what that's really not any better is it okay
well there you go I like the texture then let me just put it that way I I
find it easier to not drop but the advantage of any of these phones that
have replaceable backs whether it's the S4 S3 um or whether it's the zed10 is
that you can replace that back cover with something else if you don't like the stock on So speaking of replacing
things if you don't like them there's a removable battery just like Samsung's
phones and then you've also got your sim slot right there so they make you remove
the battery in order to swap that out that's kind of a smart design and a
Micro SD card reader and if there's anything I've missed about the
HTC1 in spite of the fact that I went from iOS where Apple does has never
believed in expandable storage to Android um going from a 16 gig phone to
a 32 gig phone I found on a modern phone when you're shooting a lot of 1080p
video with how great the video capture capability ities of these new phones are
you're going to use up the space really fast if you're a content creator at all
so spec-wise you guys probably know this already it's 1280 by uh 768 so you are
fully capable of watching HD videos but not full HD that gives it 335 pixels per
inch which back when it was released was quite competitive but these days with
phones like the HTC1 and the uh and the Galaxy S4 on the market is a little bit
different um it's got Bluetooth 4 and C
Dual Band Wi-Fi 4G LTE a 1.5 GHz dual
core Snapdragon S4 plus which isn't as fast as what you might find in something
like the Droid DNA from HTC or the newer
s700 processors in the HTC1 and the
Galaxy S4 but it's still plenty fast for most of the things that you're going to
be doing whether it's uh browsing or whatever else it's got 2 gigs of RAM and
this is the kind of one of the coolest things I think that I've ever
encountered on anything anywhere ever so I haven't actually used the phone yet
I've not quite touched the screen yet but check this out so the way that
they've implemented the keyboard which is a very clean layout by the way let
just see seen reports that there's no delay no lag and that seems to be true
for the most part this is something that started to drive me crazy about the
iPhone 4 near the end of its usable lifespan for me but oh there's a bit of
a lag there yeah you can see that anyway
um is when there's a when there's a delay on the keyboard it just drives me
nuts but under the screen there's actually heat sensors so if if you
consistently mistype and Mish hit the Z10 will actually learn where you
usually hit when you're aiming for a particular key over time and make life
easier for you so hopefully slick will talk about that during his impressions
of the phone and uh yeah that that
should be just like absolutely awesome so let's show some of the basic
gestures so let's go back to see it's
funny because I I still don't know how to use it at all so I think it's uh from
one side Blackberry Hub so that takes you to the hub you can add accounts a
hub is cool because it allows you to bring all of your messaging together whether it's Facebook SMS uh or whatever
else and then besides just showing you everything at the same time you can also
filter out the things that you don't want to see uh let's just go ahead and
lock the phone so that I can so I can start from scratch here all right so
let's do a tour of the gestures that or the main gestures so we are unlocking
the phone up here actually here's something uh even when you're in sleep
you can unlock the phone by nope yeah there we go very cool so you don't
actually have to press the hard unlock button you can have it just locked and
going up from the bottom unlocks it or you can see the lock screen which will
give you a preview of any notifications that you have as well as allow you to
access your camera without actually unlocking the phone entirely so then we
do the same thing in order to do that so multitasking is accessed by scrolling up
from the bottom and from there you can actually see some of the things that I
have open open including search settings calendar now this is a funny one the
browser is open but you can see it sideways this is a bit of a weird thing
um where if you leave an app sideways and get this okay so you scroll up from
the bottom now and it opens up multi it's in portrait really so you have to
take your phone and go like this and then it leaves that app actually in in
landscape mode so there's there's some funny things that you know what for
those of you watching the video this is an unboxing I am not a Blackberry 10
expert by any stretch of the imagination but these are things that are already a
little bit unintuitive for someone who's coming from a few other major smartphone
platforms that I'm pretty familiar with now um so anyway so there's that from
the lock screen uh down swipe puts it in bedside mode which I personally think is
really cool I it basically just turns your phone into a clock and then gives
you easy access to alarms it's these kinds of productivity Focus things see
there's a little uh clock you can turn your notifications on or off uh there
you go well whatever they were off before now they're apparently I don't
know somewhere um and then you can turn your alarm on and off just by doing this
which I think is really neat and you get rid of that just by scrolling up and
getting rid of it uh the other thing too is when the phone's not unlocked again
these are very product right multitasking then we can
that see there as an Android user and an iOS user that's unintuitive to me on
both of the previous major platforms that I've used scrolling down from the
top lets me access my quick settings and my notifications regardless so there you
go we have to to be in the multitasking menu uh so rotation lock Wi-Fi
notifications alarms Bluetooth and settings are all accessible from within
here now moving over to your I guess whatever it's called app drawer right is
just scrolling to the right so you can see all your apps at launch they had
70,000 apps I don't know how many they have now but at least they have sort of
the critical ones things like Facebook and Twitter which were missing first
party apps um when Windows Phone 8 launched at least I think one or two of
them were same thing with YouTube where uh Windows Phone 8 was missing a a
native well okay there was a native app written by someone in collaboration with
Microsoft but it wasn't a Google app and uh that was that was really that was
really missing then um okay swiping oh
yeah so from within any apps let's go back to here so no matter where we are
we can go into our multitasking here this is a vastly inferior thing compared
to the uh Android experience that I've been having so when you go to here I can
see I don't need such a large preview
the browser thing that I had open or whatever else I prefer this approach
where I have nine things and I understand that the larger 4.7 in 1080P
screen versus a 4.3 in 720p screen
enables that but it's uh considering that they're in the same sort of price
bracket I would consider that a much Superior way of doing multitasking but
once you're in here you can preview your
messages just by holding and then if you gesture from left to right off the
screen you can access the Blackberry Hub which as you can see I did a quick test
between me myself and I of the text messaging and then I can also see my
text messages my Blackberry Messenger and the Hub which sort of once
you add the account puts everything in there um phone dialing so Blackberry
hasn't forgotten that this is a phone so the first thing that you're going to see
every time you scroll up from or swipe up from the bottom is going to be phone search and Camera these are sort of the
most critical these are the things I use most often on my phone with the
exception of search I really don't use that that much I usually just open a browser but phone is great to have there
you can't dial by number unfortunately so if I put in lus that's not going to
work this is a great feature on Android I use it all the time I almost never
look at my contact list anymore because I can just dial people by name
outstanding every platform should have it and that is a very very unfortunate
thing but apparently searching contacts is quick According to some of the um
sort of anecdotal evidence that I've read about but honestly I don't see this
being any quicker than what I already had on OS which is not as fast as just
dialing it in the new BlackBerry Messenger includes video calls and screen sharing as long as you have
enough data for it and of course the
feature that makes Blackberry Blackberry is the security so Blackberry balance
unlike Samsung's nox which is there bring your own device to work Initiative
for having a an employer accessible sort of corporate section of the phone when
you bring your own device and then your own personal one and they can't talk to each other Blackberry balance has been
around for years um and is very very
very well regarded in that in that respect so I think that's pretty much it
that covers what you guys probably need to know about the Z 10 that isn't going
to be covered by Slick when he goes cold turkey on Android with his S3 I'm taking
your S3 what yep no S3 for you that was
not part of the deal I'm hiding it you're going You're Going Z 10 no you're
going Z 10 and thank you for uh watching
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