12:30 PM — BlackBerry may not be the once-top company it use to be, but that doesn’t mean it can be completely forgotten. Yes, BlackBerry 10 software has been a flop, the Z10 and Q10 smartphones have also flopped, but here’s something you wouldn’t expect. The BlackBerry Z30 phablet was released last year and although it did not get much light from customers and media, it does something quite interesting and better than any other smartphone out there.
At CES, four writers over at Wired used nothing but their smartphones to do coverage. To your surprise (and mine!), it was found that the BlackBerry Z30 actually performed the best over the entire week when it came to quickly snapping pictures and typing up articles. Wired writer Tim Moynihan explains that “the keyboard just seemed very accurate in terms of response and text-correction when I was in fingers-flying mode.” He continues on to say that “the five-inch screen size of the Z30 certainly helped there, too. It was a lot more comfortable to type on than the 4.2-inch screen on the smaller Z10.” BlackBerry indeed has a very accurate and splendid keyboard.
BlackBerry Hub also received praise for its multitasking ability. The Hub is the one-stop messaging center that BlackBerry designed to help users keep track of messages from a huge variety of sources. Moynihan says that BlackBerry Hub’s seamless integration with apps such as Tumblr and Twitter meant that he could easily access all his messages and respond to them without switching apps. This makes connecting and sharing content a lot easier for writers like Moynihan and even myself.
Here’s an interesting idea. What if BlackBerry made its own keyboard available on other OS’s? It would be a very nice little niche the company can lead as it does own one of the best keyboards on the market. Although companies like Apple don’t allow third-party companies to modify core functions such as the keyboard, so it will be interesting to see what BlackBerry could do. On Android, it’s a different story.
