About a year ago I was testing tablets for clients, and one of the tablets I tested was the Blackberry Playbook. After playing with this tablet I really fell in love with the OS. Yes it was lacking apps, but boy was it smooth, stable, and fast. My interest was piqued. I downloaded the Blackberry 10 emulator on my PC and started to play with it before it’s actually release. For a beta it was still stunning and left me longing for more. So needless to say I couldn’t wait for the release of their new flagship device the Blackberry Z10.

When I got the phone it was thin and light, but felt solid like it was built really well. I turned it on and greeted by a short demo of the gestures (the phone has no hardware buttons) which I’ll get to later, and an initial software update. After the update I logged into my Blackberry World account, and started playing. The first thing I noticed was how smooth the OS was and how I didn’t even notice not having buttons to press (to be fair the phone does have a power button, volume rocker, and a button that starts the voice control app).

Gestures, what are they and what are they all about? I’ve used gestures before on my Android tablet, and I can honestly say I didn’t like them and ended up favoring the hardware buttons, but with Blackberry 10, I found the gestures simple and quick to pick up (there are only about three that are necessary).

After setting up my accounts I went to the Hub. The Hub is the Blackberry’s version of a dashboard for your phone. All of your email accounts, calls, text messages, social media apps, and notification are in one place. I could really get used to that. I’m going to install some apps and play around with it some more, but if first impressions matter the most, so far I really like what I see.

Stay tuned for more feedback!