BlackBerry Z10: Not Too Little, But Maybe Too Late

BlackBerry is betting its bottom dollar on the BlackBerry Z10, the first phone to bear its radically redesigned new BlackBerry 10 OS. So how does it stack up? Critics generally like it, but worry that it's not enough to save the company. Here's what people are saying:

• David Pogue used to think BlackBerry was doomed. "I was wrong," he writes in today's New York Times. The Z10 is "lovely, fast, and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas." It may lack Blackberry's signature physical keyboard, but its "mind-bogglingly clever typing system," which positions word predictions over the next letter you'd naturally type is "freaky and brilliant and very, very fast." The package is good enough to give BlackBerry a fighting chance. "On the other hand, wow, is this horse late to the race."

• "I would expect the handset to mostly appeal to the legions of BlackBerry fans that, judging by the pre-launch interest, are still out there," writes Edward Baig at USA Today. "BlackBerry very much has its bread-and-butter business customers in its sights," with excellent security features, and a pre-installed Documents to Go app that can create, edit, and view Microsoft Office and PDF files.
• But the new "user interface is so different that it will seem foreign to longtime BlackBerry users," warns Walt Mossberg, who seems generally unimpressed in the Wall Street Journal. "It worked fine in my tests, but I found it a work in progress," lacking its competitors' app selection, cloud ecosystems, and other features.
• "In the most important ways, everything comes together: a lovely HD screen, a fast processor, a camera (with tricks!) that's good enough to stand alongside the big boys," CNET's editors write. But "the Z10's unintuitive gesture paradigm creates a learning curve, and a long list of OS inefficiencies and omissions sour the experience."

(More BlackBerry stories.)