A look inside the new BlackBerry 10 mobile OS

The latest iteration of the BlackBerry OS
has been in the works for over two years
before it went official earlier today. With
dropping market share and countless
unexciting QWERTY devices in recent
years, the pressure was on for BlackBerry
to provide a capable smartphone
experience that will get them back in the
game.
Now, direct from the BlackBerry 10
launch event, we've summarized all of
the key features of the new OS, so you
can see just what the formerly known as
RIM company managed to cook up.
The biggest highlight is BlackBerry Flow,
which the company hailed as featuring
true multitasking, where your opened
apps can run simultaneously and you get
seamless transition between them.
BlackBerry Peek allows you to drag the
Hub in from the sides of the screen, so
you can see what runs in the background,
while the currently open app continues to
run.
Contacts feature full BBM integration (for
other BB10 users), and all sorts of social
networking features.
The BlackBerry Hub represents the core
of BB10, and has been redesigned to
feature deep social integration, including
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It acts as
a central location from where you can
quickly switch between your active
applications, contacts, and others.
The keyboard is BlackBerry's attempt at
extreme optimization of the smartphone
messaging experience, and it features
some very nifty tricks such as the ability
to "flick" words that show up on the
keypad for quicker typing. You can also
swipe left anywhere to delete the most
recent word entered, while missed spaces
are entered automatically. There's also
seamless Multi-language support.
By swiping upwards on a homescreen,
BlackBerry Balance allows users to quickly
move between different user
environments, such as one for work and
one for leisure.
There are apps designed specifically for
each environment, such as an app store
specifically for business applications, and
one for home. Opened business
applications are denoted by a small
briefcase icon in BlackBerry Hub.
BlackBerry Messenger has been upgraded
to offer video calls and BBM Screenshare.
The latter allows you to share either the
phone's screen or what's shot by the
primary camera, during the video call.
The BlackBerry camera features
Timeshift, which allows you to take
several photos and combine the best
elements from each of them, similar to
Nokia's Smart Shoot lens with Scalado
technology.
There's also an integrated picture editor
that lets you apply photo effects, and a
Story Maker which lets you make a
collage by combining multiple photos,
video clips and music tracks. You just
insert the multimedia content and the
app will automatically compose a video
clip complete with soundtrack.
Unfortunately, BlackBerry did not get into
specifics regarding the browsing
experience provided by BlackBerry 10
(although Alicia Keys was pretty psyched
about it). What we do know is the
BlackBerry 10 browser scored some truly
impressive marks at the html5test.com ,
while still in beta.