My first couple of days with the new Blackberry has made it apparent why Blackberry’s CEO, Thorsten Heins, is so passionate about the new Blackberry 10 Operating System and the phones they are releasing with it. The OS is easy to use, it’s intuitive, and it’s fast. For those of you who follow Kevin O’Leary on MSN Money, he recently did an interview about the “killer phone apps” (email, calendar, and contacts) and how those apps make up about 80% of our smartphone usage. When it comes to these killer apps, most people (I wasn’t always one of them) will agree that Blackberry has always understood how to effectively deliver them. As for the ‘lack of apps’ debate, I have only found one App that’s missing for my personal use – a Microsoft Lync Client. Though, as a friend of mine recently said “Having no Lync Client is better than having a crappy Lync Client” (He’s an iPhone user).

As for hardware, the phone has a bright screen and I have not had any trouble (even in direct sunlight) reading it. I got over the lack of navigation/home buttons pretty fast, and at this point I’m comfortable using just the touch screen to navigate the phone. So much so in fact that I when I pick up my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S3 it feels alien to me. The Z10 touchscreen is fluid and responds instantly. It’s not an AMOLED screen like you see on Samsung’s devices, but it display’s HD Video almost as good as my Samsung Plasma Television. I will mention that when I put my SD card in from my Android phone that it was recognized and worked fine however if you had an Android Phone and the card was formatted to EXT3 format you’ll want to back it up and format it to FAT32. This will eliminate any possible reboot issues (there have been reports that Android’s ext3 partition style caused the Z10 to reboot when it accesses the card). If your using a card larger than 32GB you’ll also need to format it to FAT32 for the additional storage to be recognized.

I can’t say enough about the keyboard on this device. It’s easily the fastest keyboard on any mobile device and I’d challenge even a good Swype user to a contest! Not only is the keyboard accurate from the start but it learns your input style as you type, meaning it will guess the words you are typing based on your history and its dictionary. So as you’re typing, the Z10 pops-up predictive text matches on the keyboard and you can quickly swipe upwards at that word and it inserts it into the text your typing. I haven’t utilized that feature much to date, but can see it becoming useful. The keyboard is one of the reasons Kevin O’Leary switched from the iPhone to the Z10, calling the device “The best technology on the market today”. If you do a lot of typing on your mobile device the keyboard will become your best friend. For me, it’s almost as fast as typing on a normal PC keyboard! Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman of Google is a longtime Blackberry user, and professed in a 2013 interview that he prefers the keyboard on the Blackberry over other devices (including his own?).

Stay tuned for my final thoughts on what could be the most underrated smartphone and mobile OS on the market today!