[meh01]

Everything you just stated is gimmick. Physical keyboards are over.

And the "true multitasking" sort of works (pretty much as well as Anroid) only because they bolted 2GB of RAM onto the thing.

BlackBerry are dead. The OS looks like amateur hour, the icons look inspired by Windows XP, and even their default font is badly rendered everywhere. The Android emulator is unusably slow (nothing like what it was in the desktop simulator) and pointless. It should be removed.

It's a decent beta, but that's about it. They're done.

[potatolicious]

> "And the "true multitasking" sort of works (pretty much as well as Anroid) only because they bolted 2GB of RAM onto the thing."

Well, yeah. So what?

As an iOS user I'm salivating at the thought of actually being able to IM people properly. Right now invariably it goes something like this:

[push notification: you have a new message!]

[tap on notification]

[IM app launches]

[go get a coffee]

[IM app launched! Retrieving your new messages...]

[go get a sandwich]

[here's that message!]

Real multitasking is a huge win, even a diehard iOS user like myself will admit. I don't care if they had to summon Cthulhu to make it work - but as long as it does, it's a great selling point.

[untog]

Then that's a strange quirk of iOS- Android handles it just fine. The point is that they aren't the only OS with "true multitasking" out there.

[lmg643]

physical keyboards are not over!

the growth of the blackberry was driven by communicating when you are out of the office, whereas the iphone is really a portable computer with cellular antenna.

the original blackberries were a 2-3 line screen with a keyboard, and the screen grew in size from there. that's what most of corporate america first got hooked on, at least in my memory (a young geezer).

from what i see, folks that chose the iphone either never cared about writing an email remotely, or forego that capability (or compromise) in exchange for the apps, games etc.

iphones in the workplace are comical.

folks who have iphones tend to write back "ok" or "talk tmrw" etc in response when they are out of office. they can't use the keyboard, and it's hard to pretend - takes a lot of effort. or, if they try to write more, it is endless typos or bizarre auto-correct comments.

i write this as a blackberry bold user, so understand my biases, but for actual email communication, nothing comes close. (and i tried iphone/android for a while to see if i could do it - can't).

so, i'm looking forward to the q10, at least one idiot still functional in the blackberry ecosystem. maybe a 12-step program will help.

[marknutter]

everyone I know who owns a smartphone with a virtual keyboard is very proficient at typing on it, myself included. Older folks may have a hard time with it, but the younger crowd adapted very nicely to it. I'd rather have the extra screen real-estate.

[zmonkeyz]

I don't see how the phone's android emulation can be slower than the Playbook. The Playbook emulation actually works pretty well. The same goes for the multitasking. I'd be surprised if the BB10 multitasking was worse than the Playbook which multitasks like a beast. With that said I wonder if it has a mode to turn off "showcase" type multitasking to save battery life?

[guyzero]

Who cares how much RAM it has? RAM is dirt cheap. Phones should have 10x that much memory.