Part 2 iSwitched to Blackberry 10 Blog 30 Day Challenge Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,061 words · ~10 min read
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hello and welcome to part two of my Blackberry ey switched I'm slick and
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this part two will be a continuation of last time where it's just more of a
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general use case of the phone I realized after reading some basic tips on
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Blackberry 10 that if you hold the camera button down here for long enough
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it'll open the camera app one thing that I noticed that I thought should be
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implemented and wasn't implemented is the notifications along this left side
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which look very similar to the camera button um if you hold them nothing
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happens and if you just keep kind of doing it the Blackberry will eventually tell you
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to just swipe up to unlock your phone it would be nice if like the camera app if
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I held one of my notifications it would open the app that corresponds with that
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notification this is something I didn't notice right away but for a different reason um this is not my Sim in this
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phone this phone is given to us by Belle so it's a different phone number and
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everything so I was avoiding calling people and texting because I didn't have
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contacts in my phone or so I thought when I linked Gmail with my phone it
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grabbed all my contacts with Gmail um almost without me noticing which was
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great I'm not saying anything bad about that and perfectly listed all of them
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had all their information like it was great I guess that's more on Gmail side but it was still great on BlackBerry so
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since then I've used the phone's uh calling and texting features much more
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and there's nothing really to note um
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this is more on Belle side instead of blackberry I haven't had any service
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issues anywhere that I've been um and
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everything else has been fine as a general observation about the Blackberry
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experience now this is not the heavy use experience that will be next episode and
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the next and the episode after that um I
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finally I spend less time on my phone um
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but not because I don't necessarily enjoy the phone it's more
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because I come on my phone I go to HUB I
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check everything I need to and then I just feel like I'm done on Android I
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would find that as I'm going through apps and going individually to each app
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that I want to see and going through all my information checking everything I
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would spend more time on this I get
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everything I need to and I get out so it I guess it kind of depends on what you
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want do you want to spend that much time on your phone some people do I'm not
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actually sure at this point I I like the experience of my Android phone where I
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can jump on and each individual app is
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there and all that kind of stuff which you can also do on BlackBerry but the
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awesomeness of the Hub is that everything that you need to know every
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direct notification that you have is always there so you can just quickly go
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through all the important things and then just be done with your phone which is also kind of relaxing I used the
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music player a bit and it was fine nothing really interesting to note but
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one thing that I did notice is that the phone has I believe it's 16 16 different
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volume levels so as you're going through the volume rocker there's 16 stops which
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is kind of awesome actually my S3 has 7
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I believe yeah my S3 has 7 so you wouldn't think that's that big of
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a deal but for fine Precision if you want it to be very quiet but it's maybe
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a quiet video so you need some things to be audible or if you want it to just be
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super loud but not quite as loud It's actually kind of nice to have that many
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stops in the volume knob we talked about this last time a little bit but one thing that I really don't like
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personally about the Blackberry experience so far is the rotate um it
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goes really slow as you can probably see there I got comments saying that that
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might be by Design but if it is by Design it's not a design that I
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personally like some people might like it I don't you have to wait a while I
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like snappier Auto rotates also it works
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well in some apps it doesn't work that great in other apps and in your recently
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used app section it will save if it was rotated or not so it just becomes a
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hassle in my opinion so I usually just go into the drop down at the top and put
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rotation lock on so it won't rotate but then if I restart the phone in any way
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it resets that setting so I'll reset the phone or it'll die and I'll charge it
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back up or something turn it back on and then turn my phone and it'll rotate and
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it's just really annoying one thing I don't like is when using stuff like the
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Hub if you send an email or something it always attaches a this was sent from I
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think it was this was sent from my Blackberry 10
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smartphone uh a lot of different things have done this in the past but I really
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don't like it I go through and manually delete it every single time so I guess
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it's not that big of a deal but I I really don't like that so BBM is cool
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being able to see if your messages are read are cool um everything that comes
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with BBM is cool but the fact that I only know two people that have
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blackberries makes it not very cool because there's not very many people
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that I can actually do it with um but that being said I think a day or
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two ago Blackberry announced that they're going to be releasing BBM apps
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for Android and iOS so that might make
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black BlackBerry message are cool again I don't know I just don't have that use
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case yet hopefully it gets released soon they said sometime this summer so far
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far now keep in mind this is being said from a very basic use point the next two
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videos will be more advanced I'm going to sideload Android apps I'm going to do a whole bunch of other stuff
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um I currently would not really recommend this phone to someone now
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again this is I have not used Android sideloaded apps I'm completely ignoring
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that whole part of blackberry just the stock use case I would not necessarily
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recommend this to someone who enjoys
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spending a crazy amount of time on their phone not that it's bad for them
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but I feel like the best use case for this phone is someone who wants to be
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able to jump on their phone and instantly check all their notifications
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and then be done because it excels so much at that I would recommend it to
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people that have that use case scenario people that are very busy uh people that are into business and need to be able to
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check things really quickly and then get back to a meeting or whatever they're doing that's awesome um but the comfy
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fluffy experience that is Android and iOS or not iOS so much cuz I don't know
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iOS but at least Android um it's not the
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same the browser seems all fine and good I haven't done actually speed test
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benchmarks on it or anything but it seems not too slow but also not exactly
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that fast although I do like it how it manages tabs so in the bottom left hand
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corner there's a little button that says exactly how many tabs you have open Bop
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that over it comes over from the left and then you can quick one big thing
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with tabs that I like is being able to quickly close them so if you bop it over
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from here you can just press the little X and quickly close your tabs so far I
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really like the typing experience on BlackBerry the autoc correct of swiping
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up from a letter to go with the next word that corresponds with that letter
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is nice once you get used to it at the beginning it's kind of weird because you
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have to go slow so that you can kind of get used to when it's going to pop up
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but then when you get used to how it acts it can be quite quick especially if
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you're typing with one finger personally I have very large thumbs so I cover up a
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lot of the keyboard while I'm typing so if I'm typing with two fingers I can't
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really see the word that's going to pop up above the letter
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so sometimes it doesn't work that great but if I'm typing with one finger it's
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awesome makes me go way faster way way faster sometimes one big complaint
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though is if I want to type a word that it doesn't like say awesome sauce but
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with no space if I want that to actually go through so I don't want a space in
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between the words awesome and sauce I have to swipe up from the space bar
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because the space bar is going to automatically try and correct simple mistakes like no space between awesome
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and sauce so if I press space bar it goes awesome space sauce if I swipe up
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it goes awesome sauce one word but swiping up from the space bar with a
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very large thumb will very often close my texting app because of how Blackberry
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acts swiping up from the bottom closes your app now it's not supposed to
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because in theory you're just swiping up from the space bar but my thumb is huge
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I don't like I have large hands so often
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no matter how hard I try I'm swiping the whole app away so sometimes even if I'm
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typing with my thumbs I have to reconfigure how I'm holding the phone
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and swipe up from the space bar using my pointer finger so I can actually do it
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accurately this might not be a problem for everyone but it's really annoying
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for me one thing with Blackberry that caught me off guard was the story maker
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app it's the only time that I felt Blackberry actually stepped outside of their element the whole time you're
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using the phone it feels very professional very clean cut and then you
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step into the story maker app and you just pick a whole bunch of random photos
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pick a song and it makes us a fairly nicely animated slideshow with for you
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with fairly professional looking intro and outros um then I got to thinking and
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realized that it's fairly professional looking it's not super flashy it's
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fairly professional looking so um my
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theory behind this is that you're running late for a meeting and you need a slideshow so you can just make a
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little slideshow on there so that basically concludes the ending of my
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standard use case scenario for this phone next week I will be doing a lot of
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side loading Android apps and very recently as some of you have told me and
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I found out myself Skype actually finally released their official release
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of their Skype app it's no longer in beta so I'll be trying that as well um
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comment below on anything you would like me to do for next Blackberry I switched
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comment about anything you liked or disliked about this video and please
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