How long was the wait for BlackBerry 10? Long enough that the finished product seems to have skipped ahead several generations.
Tight product cycles from increased competition meant BlackBerry was entering a market in which a revolutionary product was next to impossible. Free people from their desks to send and receive email? Revolutionary. A better contact manager, cool time-shift camera and “flick” typing? Evolutionary.
That said, the BlackBerry 10 devices -the Z10 virtual keyboard model and the upcoming Q10 with the physical keyboard- might feel revolutionary to longtime BlackBerry users. The BlackBerry 10, says CIO’s Michael Gartenberg, put BlackBerry “back in the game”.
One piece of evidence is Opera. Opera Mini, the mobile version of the Opera browser was popular on previous BlackBerry models because it made the old BlackBerry 7 models feel more like a modern smartphone and less like feature phones.
Oslo-based Opera, which launched in 1994, are experts at building fast, secure feature rich browsers that are perfect for devices with limited memory and/or small screens.
The Opera Mini browser, as of a check three minutes ago on our Z10 device, is not available. But you will probably be hard pressed to notice. There are no internet forums packed with BlackBerry users demanding it. No sideways hacks to make it work on the new devices. No passion-filled bloggers pounding their fist on the table.
That’s because the native browser in BlackBerry 10 is ridiculous. In the two-weeks since we have had the device it has done everything our desktop browser does, and it’s faster. The tabs open in a lovely series of tiles. Shortcuts can be added to the home screen. It supports Flash, which can be disabled on command. It seamlessly allows you to share web pages with any of your contacts.
There were hints about the browser in November, when RIM’s VP Developer Relations, Alec Saunders, bragged about it to CNET.
“We have a more [HTML5] standards-compliant browser than anybody else,” he said. “It beats every desktop browser, it beats every mobile browser, it beats every tablet browser, when you start to measure the scores.”
When BGR got hold of a a developer kit version of BlackBerry 10, it said the browser “smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test.”
The video they were referring to, from website GadgetMasters, is below.
About The Author /
Cantech Letter founder and editor Nick Waddell has lived in five Canadian provinces and is proud of his country's often overlooked contributions to the world of science and technology. Waddell takes a regular shift on the Canadian media circuit, making appearances on CTV, CBC and BNN, and contributing to publications such as Canadian Business and Business Insider.
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“Ridiculous” isn’t a good word to use if you’re writing an article that will be read by non-hipsters, and you mean “good”. “Worthy of ridcule” doesn’t mean “best ever”, not in my dictionary.
agree bad choice of words.
I think opera mini should be ported to BB10, because of the data compression functionality.
I’m dying without opera on my BlackBerry 10 because no other browser will automatically display web pages as columns properly, so that the text is always the same readable size. On Opera does this right.
I would like to have it on my Z10 just ’cause I have had Opera since before Windows 95, but the article is 100% bang on, the Z10 browser blows all other browsers I’ve tried away (including desktop browsers). Having Opera would be nice for the Opera Unite capabilities, I suppose, but it would be more of a “nice to have” than an actual need on BB10. Still, Opera has for the longest time been ahead of the game on stuff like tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, sad to see them fall behind and not support the most modern mobile platform.