Inside the Z10, you'll find a healthy compliment of feeds, speeds, and other things that rhyme with feeds and speeds. Probably. The phone is powered by a dual-core CPU clocked to 1.5GHz (BlackBerry hasn't specified which processor). The device has a fat 2GB of RAM alongside 16GB of internal storage (that can be expanded, of course, all the way up to 48GB with the use of a 32GB microSD card). And yes, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, and ambient light sensor are all here too, as they should be. The phone will be available on Verizon and AT&T equipped with LTE radios; I tested the AT&T version. It's a modern smartphone, and it's stocked like a modern smartphone.

The Z10 has two cameras, a rear-facing 8 megapixel shooter capable of 1080p video, and a front-facing 2 megapixel camera which can do 720p video capture. Both are reasonably clear and useful, though you're not going to be doing much serious picture taking with the front lens. The backside cam produced decent if somewhat washed out looking shots, and focusing could sometimes be a problem (particularly in burst mode or with macro shots). The camera also seems to suffer from the all-too-common pink blotch in the center of the image, which can make shots with lots of pale or white tones look off color, literally.

BlackBerry 10 provides some interesting tools for dealing with photo taking, most notably that burst mode, which the company calls TimeShift. It allows you to snap and then choose a frame from a series of shots after (and supposedly before, but not really) the frame you wanted. I'll talk about that more in the software section, but I did find the function to be reasonably useful in a number of scenarios.

The display on the Z10 is a handsome 1280 x 768, 356 PPI LCD screen, and I found its color reproduction, clarity, and touch response to be among the best I've used. That said, the screen's backlight seemed noticeably darker than many devices I compared it to (particularly the iPhone) even at full brightness, and color tone and saturation seemed to lean towards a yellowish / greenish hue. As a standalone, you won't notice the differences, though next to other devices there's a clear variation in the overall nits it's outputting.

User interface

BlackBerry 10 is built around a handful of basic concepts and gestures, some of which would be difficult to discover without a tutorial, yet seem obvious once you've mastered them. That is to say the OS is not especially intuitive, but it works well and makes sense despite that fact.

Since there are no physical navigation buttons on the phone and no persistent onscreen navigation, gestures are used to move through the software. There are really two main gestures required to get around: a swipe up from the bottom of the screen, which brings you to your homescreen no matter where you are, and a swipe up, hold, and slide to the right to reveal (or "peek" at) your BlackBerry Hub, a unified notification area which also doubles as your inbox for email, text messages, and more. That gesture takes a little getting used to — think of it like the beginning of a McDonald's "M" arch.

BB10 can best be thought of as an operating system with four main states: on your homescreen, in an application, in your messages (BlackBerry Hub), or in your app drawer.

The "center" of the phone is a unique take on the homescreen, a page representing your currently running applications (up to eight only) in a grid of large, rectangular icons. Those icons sometimes do double duty as widgets, switching over to glanceable information (like the current weather) once you minimize the application. From that screen, you can swipe left to a rather standard list of application icons and folders, or if you swipe to the right, you get your BlackBerry Hub. The only other consistent state is within an application itself.

The interface shares much in common with Android and iOS, and at times feels like a hybrid of the two. While you do have some widget functionality on your homescreen, it's strictly controlled and tied to running apps. The application drawer functions almost identically to iOS', allowing you to slide icons around and drop them into folders as the system automatically rearranges your grid.

The homescreen concept is interesting, but failed to convince me that it was a better solution than what Android proposes. The idea that an app can become to a widget when not running is novel, but you have no sense of which app will become a widget, and you have no control over whether or not that widget will always be visible. In fact, you have no control over your multitasking / homescreen arrangement save for the fact that you can kill a process. The apps order, or if they stay in place, is determined simply by which one you've most recently had open. And once you get to app nine... your old apps are dismissed unceremoniously.

The end result is a feeling of unpredictability. Not only can you not control which apps remain open or where they're located, you also don't have a consistent sense of where to find certain pieces of information. If you're like me, you like to be able to glance at things like the weather quickly and conveniently — even Apple gets this one kind of right in iOS' Notification Center — but BlackBerry 10 provides no such option.

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.

Remember

BlackBerry has made some smart decisions in BlackBerry 10, including the deep integration of third-party services at a native, system level. This is true with Dropbox support in the file manager of the phone, and it's also present in the to-do / reminder app Remember.

Remember offers the ability to sync with your Evernote account natively, providing access to your notes (and the ability to create new ones) right inside the app. For the most part, the experiment is a success, though I found the implementation lacking in a couple of key areas. Most notably, the app doesn't seem to support inline images, relegating your visual clips to a weird pile of attachments. That's nice if you're heavy on text — but I tend to find a lot of imagery and drop it into Evernote, and this makes getting into your files a pain. Secondly, there's no way in the app to really browse your content — you're either editing it or you're not, so forget about a casual look at what you've saved or clipped.

Camera

BlackBerry has gone to no small amount of trouble to make its camera software unique, and for the most part, the company has succeeded. While not the most intuitive (or bug-free) camera interface on the market, the BlackBerry 10 camera UI does offer a couple of novel tweaks that make it slightly more interesting than your average phone.

The most notable feature of BlackBerry's new camera suite is its TimeShift mode, which functions as a kind of burst shooting mode, and can capture a handful of snaps of the same scene in a short amount of time (about the time you typically take to focus and shoot). Furthermore, the camera detects faces, allowing you to zero in on particular expressions for a shot and then select those frames for your final product.

The novelty works well and actually seemed to produce slightly better results than the average snap-and-pray approach, though I'm not entirely convinced it makes the camera on the Z10 any more useful than an iPhone or decent Android shooter. Still, it's good to see someone trying to do something new, and I'm sure people will find creative uses for the functionality.

STORY MAKER

Story Maker is a curious case of BlackBerry reaching outside its safety zone — to tremendous effect.

The app is basically the BlackBerry take on iMovie, which is to say you can create compact, simple edits of your video content that you can pair with music from your library and some surprisingly cool, templated effects. I don't have a lot to say about the app except that it's an excellent example of what BlackBerry is capable of. It's fun. It's useful. I liked it. Would buy again. A+++.