BlackBerry Z10 review: a new life, or life support?

The BlackBerry Hub exhibits similar issues, though I think the concept is far more compelling. The most basic way to think about the Hub is as a unified inbox, except this inbox encompasses nearly every type of notification or message you will receive on the phone. Email from multiple accounts, BBMs of all types, SMS and MMS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, phone calls, system notifications (such as app update notices), and more. Notifications or messages can be viewed in a consolidated manner in the main hub view, or broken out into their respective groupings.

At a basic level, this idea makes a lot of sense. Instead of just representing a notification, it becomes one and the same with the information the notification represents. Additionally, grouping all of your messages together makes it easy to triage your work and easily see everything that's waiting for you.

Unfortunately, there's a lot about the execution that doesn't work. For instance, you can't see what kind of notifications you have waiting for you unless you peek over at your list (there are actually icons that show you what's new, but you still have to use the peek gesture to see them). Additionally, the Hub doesn't always represent your overall lists of notifications or messages — when you hear an SMS notification and go to check it out, you're greeted with whatever you were doing last, which forces you to then hit a "back" button that appears in applications, or swipe over (a gesture that works in some places, but not in others). In general, I felt like I was doing a lot of extra work to see the most recent stuff in my Hub.

Compared with how iOS and Android handle notifications, the Z10 felt clunkier and more confusing in some ways. I would rather have a representation of a notification that is abstracted from the actual message, because that allows me to dismiss the transitory notices without having to necessarily deal with the content itself.

The unified inbox is a great idea, but having to deal with both your actual inbox and your notifications on the same level creates complications that I think could be mitigated. It's not that the BlackBerry Hub concept doesn't work — I actually think it works quite well — it's that it might not be the most efficient way to deal with a constant barrage of alerts.

The Hub feels sloppily executed, as do other parts of the UI. As I mentioned, a "back" button does appear sometimes, a crucial piece of navigation without which the phone would be impossible to navigate. Why isn't it always present? It's almost as if BlackBerry wanted to use an Android motif, but didn't want to seem like it was piggybacking on someone else's idea. Weirdly, some apps avoid the back button and bring in other navigational elements. The Facebook app and USA Today apps utilize a drawer system that mirrors Android's Holo app guidelines, so instead of tapping the back button, you're supposed to swipe or hit a drawer icon. And yet other first party apps (such as Remember) use a combination of a drawer and back button. It gets confusing fast, and often what I expected to happen simply didn't. The interface zigs when you expect it to zag.

Adding additional confusion, there's another, hidden menu available in applications if you swipe down from the top of the screen. In most apps this reveals settings for the application, but outside of apps, it brings up a system settings tray that looks a whole lot like Android's window shade notification area. You cannot get to the settings menu for the phone within apps, however; you must first back out to the homescreen or another neutral system area. Why is this the case? Why didn't BlackBerry just incorporate app setting panels into that dropdown? Or better yet, why not just expose app settings in another location in the app?

Still, all of these issues aside, I wouldn't say that the general UI is ineffective. Despite some points of confusion, once you get the hang of what the phone is going to do (and specific apps), you do get into a kind of flow. After a couple of days with the device, I found my frustration was significantly reduced, and I was actually enjoying some of the workflows of the device. In particular, I think BlackBerry's concept of the upward swipe to take you home works as it should — I didn't find myself wishing for a home button. Actually, it reminded me in a rather distinct way of webOS, and when I went back to other phones, I found myself wishing for the gesture. I don't feel BlackBerry 10 deals with multitasking or notifications as effectively as other platforms do (most notably Android), but it's not a total strikeout.

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