The tech rumor mill has been very busy of late, what with having to churn out gossip on everything from low end Smartphones to powerful gaming consoles. Here are snippets we picked up about the impending BlackBerry 10 release:
- RIM is likely to launch two BB10 devices: a 4.2 inch full touchscreen phone called the Z10, and a QWERTY-touchscreen combo handset called the X10. These are the premium handsets, and two mid-range and low end handsets are also expected to be rolled out at a later date.
- The Z10 will feature a 4.2 inch screen with a 1280 x 768 resolution and 356 ppi, and will be powered by a Dual-Core 1.5Ghz processor. It will have an 8MP rear camera, and 2MP front camera. It will have NFC connectivity, and LTE speed. There’s a microSD card slot for memory expansion, and the 1800 mAh battery is removable. Details of the X10 are not yet known, other than its screen resolution: 720 x 720 pixels. Other specs are likely to be similar to the Z 10’s.
- The new handsets will be missing the trackpad and the traditional 4 BB buttons, relying on the touchscreen instead.
- The new virtual keyboards will have new features including predictive text, and to swipe the suggested word up so it becomes part of your sentence. This will give the users a smooth typing experience and reduce typing time. The keyboard also recognizes if you forget to tap the spacebar, and corrects it for you. It also supports 3 languages simultaneously. So if you’re multilingual, you can type a couple of words in another language; the keyboard will not force translate it to English.
- Current owners of BB phones will not be able to upgrade to BB10, but an OS upgrade will be available for PlayBook users.
- After their successful Portathons where they encouraged hundreds of developers to port their apps to the BB10 platform, RIM expects to offer their customers between 70,000 to 100,000 apps in the BlackBerry World (new name for PlayBook) at the BB10 launch. That’s pretty impressive.
- BlackBerry Flow is one of the major concepts of BB10. This allows you to keep several apps open at the same time (minimized of course) and you can switch between apps by simply swiping. You can see relevant info from the minimized apps and go to the app you want by tapping.
- The next major feature is BlackBerry Peek, which is important for accessing the BB hub. From any screen, you can view your notifications by just swiping up and to go the hub (which is constantly running), you just swipe right. The hub lets you view all your calls, appointments, messages, BBMs and so on in one space.
- BlackBerry balance is a great Enterprise feature. From the home screen swipe down and register you account with the IT admin running BB Enterprise server. You will see two partitions on your phone: business and personal. Data is encrypted, and what’s on your personal partition cannot be read from the business one and vice versa. There are separate apps for the two and they can run simultaneously.
Of course, the rumors are flying fast and hard and there may be more specs doing the round.
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