It's been eons in coming, but pre-ordered BlackBerry Z10's will start being delivered in Australian from Monday.
More than four years has elapsed since BlackBerry brought out its first touchscreen model, the Storm, in late 2008. It also released a sliding keyboard touchscreen model, The Torch, in 2010.
The fact BlackBerry has been so slow in comprehensively responding to the touchscreen challenge issued by Apple in 2007 is the reason for the Canadian company's slide from a market leader to near irrelevance.
Having said that, the Z10 is a quality product with good features. Physically, it is an attractive, solid-looking phone with a dazzling 4.2-inch touchscreen with higher resolution than the iPhone 5.
It is 4G-network capable, has near field communication (NFC) for contactless payments, an 8-megapixel back-facing camera and 2-megapixel front-facing one.
Unlike some recently announced Android models, the Z10 has a microSD card port, so you can augment its internal 16 Gigabytes of storage with up to 64GB more, and a removable battery, although at 1800 milliampere hours it is not big.
There are also mini HDMI and microUSB ports and it is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm processor.
Some reviewers say the new BlackBerry 10 operating system and its touch gestures make for a considerable learning curve. I don't agree. Once I became used to swiping, I found it natural and easy to move between the initial Hub interface to active frames, which show currently running apps, and then swiping to the left again for apps.
The only confusion I have is that within apps you hit a back button, whereas the natural inclination is to gesture right to left.
Navigating between apps is easy once you learn to swipe upward and to the right. The gesture system reminds me of Nokia's N9 a couple of years ago.
BlackBerry Hub, messaging and mail is what you see first when you turn on the phone - rather than Apple's apps or Android's home pages. BlackBerry has determined that being connected with the world is top priority for users.
The Hub is a long list of communications including outgoing emails that are shown with ticks. My only problem was that the Z10 failed to sync all my contacts coming from a Microsoft Outlook account.
I found the soft keyboard easy to use and having suggested words appearing in the keyboard area rather than above it enhances typing speed.
The 8-megapixel camera is decent, too, and you can shoot 1080p video, but the lack of snapping options puts the camera behind the latest Android competition. Nokia in contrast has harnessed the PureView technology on its flagship Lumia 920 to lure customers to Windows phone. BlackBerry hasn't gone to this effort.
Browsing is fast and websites look great on the high definition screen. I particularly liked the BlackBerry Link software for wirelessly moving media from a home PC to the phone. Once established, the Z10 appears as a disk drive on your desktop and you move data to and fro it without the cable - simple but efficient.
The Z10's voice recognition also is pretty accurate. It does not handle the diversity of inquiries you can make on Apple's Siri but I found it informative when learning voice mail features.
Apps or the lack of them remain a big handicap for this phone. It's not that there's just 70,000 apps available, it's the fact key ones are missing.
In Australia you can forget CommBank's Kaching app (except in a browser), Woolworths or Coles apps for example. Sometimes there are substitutes, such as cloud offerings Connect to DropBox and Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive.
There are some Australian apps present or coming. They include Tripview Sydney with its rail, bus and ferry timetables, the popular goCatch taxi app, hotels search Hotels Combined, local fashion retailer The Iconic, FoxSports and Virgin Australia.
Purchasers should first check BlackBerry World online to see that no vital apps are missing.
For enterprises there is also BlackBerry Balance - the capacity to split the phone into a personal space and separately secured work space with work apps.
BlackBerry is not the only company providing a separately secured enterprise space on a phone, but the service should be popular with companies who traditionally like BlackBerry's bullet-proof security.
I liked the Z10 a lot, apart from the annoying contacts sync issue, and found it efficient and easy to use, but wonder whether it can succeed in a market where most users are committed to other smartphone platforms.
The Z10 will be available starting from Monday on contract through Optus and then through Telstra and retailer Harvey Norman.
