 This video is brought to you by Cooler Master Mobile, featuring the Jazz Pro Notebook Stand. Check it out at mobile.coolermaster-usa.com Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the BlackBerry Z10. So I'm going to open this up with saying a big thanks to Bell Mobility here in Canada for providing me with a BlackBerry Z10 because otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get my hands on this phone. And as a Canadian, I am extremely excited about the Z10 because it is one of those sort of, you know, Canadian company, formerly RIM, now BlackBerry. It's just kind of their last big sort of kick at the can with BlackBerry 10 and I'm really, really excited to try it out. But the funny thing about trying it out is that I'm not actually going to be the one trying it out. Doing our iSwitched 30-day trial with BlackBerry 10 is actually going to be Slick's responsibility. So that'll be interesting. He's been a hardcore Android user for a long time. And I'm just fascinated to see how this goes. So inside the box, we find not really a whole lot. There's little tiny wall wart. Very, very slim, very stylish, very small. I mean, personally, I prefer if they ship a bigger wall wart and it charges faster. But as long as it, you know, charges the phone and charges it adequately, then I don't think we're going to have a problem here. The USB port is on the side of it, just like that. All right. Also included in the box, we've got some documentation. So start here, which has presumably some instructions, because BlackBerry 10 is all about gestures. It's about getting around with gestures. There's no back button. There isn't even a home button. There's not a single hardware button on the phone. So for those of you who are used to iOS or used to Android devices, where you do have hard buttons, it might be a bit of a thing to adapt to. Now, I was one of those few sort of, you know, demented people who thought that the BlackBerry Playbook was awesome at the time and really enjoyed the gesture-based navigation. So maybe when Slick's done with the Z10, I'll spend some time with it and see what I think of that in more of a smartphone-like environment. So the other things inside the box are, you know, nice long USB to A to mini B cable for charging as well as a pair of headphones. Although I'm not entirely convinced that anyone actually uses the headphones slash headsets that are included with phones these days. But there you go. It's got a single button so you can take your calls as well as a clip. So you can clip it to things and then what appear to be probably the most uncomfortable earbuds ever. Anyway, that's not what you paid good money for. You paid good money for the Z10 phone. So on the top of the phone, you're going to find your lock button as well as your headphone and microphone port. So it's a 3.5 millimeter jack. I've actually powered up the phone just now. The Z10 has one of the brightest screens available on the market with some guys measuring it as high as 700 CD per M squared, which is pretty much meant to be usable in direct sunlight. The disadvantage to the way that they've implemented their screen brightness functionality is that you actually cannot turn off auto brightness. Now, this is one of the things that bothered me immediately about Windows Phone 8 where some of the decisions were being made for me. For example, in Windows Phone 8, it is impossible to lock the auto-rotate. You can't do it. It auto-rotates no matter what. I'm looking at this going, really? And then in iOS, at least back when I was using it, maybe they've changed this now, you were only able to lock phones in portrait. You couldn't lock them in landscape. Why are you making these decisions for me? Why don't you let me make the decision whether I want to trade off battery life or whether I want to trade off the screen brightness? So there you go. That's something that sort of doesn't appeal to me about it right off the bat. But since I'm not the one doing the iSwitch, I won't be the one to have any complaints about it, I suppose. On the side, we find micro HDMI as well as a USB port for charging. And then on the bottom, we've got what looks like, yes, the price spot to take off the back plate. So we'll cover that in just a moment. And then on the other side, we've got the volume rocker. So on the back of the unit, there's sort of a chrome finish thing here. I'm sure if you're watching this video, you've probably seen a BlackBerry Z10 at this point. But there's the 8 megapixel rear camera as well as the flash. And then on the front, there's a 2 megapixel camera that is right about there. Now, I've had people complain. Oh, look at that. My screen turned off. I've had people complain about the finish of the back of the phone, saying that it feels cheap. But I don't get that impression at all. I mean, let's be really clear. This is not the HTC One. This is not like a beautiful one of the most beautifully anodized finished phones I've ever encountered. But it's also not, where did that thing go? It's also not a Galaxy S4, where it's like a glossy, scratchable piece of plastic on the back that actually feels quite flimsy even compared to the Z10. So let's go ahead and pop the backing off of this one. You can see it's just like, it could be a butterfly if butterflies were made of plastic and stuck to the back of phones. Whereas the one on the Z10, which I've already, actually, you know what? That's really not any better, is it? Okay, well, there you go. I like the texture then. Let me just put it that way. I find it easier to not drop. But the advantage of any of these phones that have replaceable backs, whether it's the S4, S3, or whether it's the Z10, is that you can replace that back cover with something else if you don't like the stock one. So speaking of replacing things, if you don't like them, there's a removable battery just like Samsung's phones. And then you've also got your SIM slot right there. So they make you remove the battery in order to swap that out. That's kind of a smart design. And a micro SD card reader. And if there's anything I've missed about the HTC One, in spite of the fact that I went from iOS, where Apple has never believed in expandable storage, to Android, going from a 16 gig phone to a 32 gig phone, I found on a modern phone, when you're shooting a lot of 1080p video with how great the video capture capabilities of these new phones are, you're going to use up the space really fast if you're a content creator at all. So spec-wise, you guys probably know this already, it's 1280 by 768, so you are fully capable of watching HD videos, but not full HD, that gives it 335 pixels per inch, which back when it was released was quite competitive, but these days with phones like the HTC One and the Galaxy S4 on the market is a little bit different. It's got Bluetooth 4, NFC, dual band Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, a 1.5 GHz dual core Snapdragon S4+, which isn't as fast as what you might find in something like the Droid DNA from HTC, or the newer S700 processors in the HTC One and the Galaxy S4, but it's still plenty fast for most of the things that you're going to be doing, whether it's browsing or whatever else. It's got 2 gigs of RAM, and this is the kind of one of the coolest things I think that I've ever encountered on anything, anywhere ever. So I haven't actually used the phone yet, I've not quite touched the screen yet, but check this out. So the way that they've implemented the keyboard, which is a very clean layout by the way, let's just see, seen reports that there's no delay, no lag, and that seems to be true for the most part. This is something that started to drive me crazy about the iPhone 4 near the end of its usable lifespan for me, but oh, there's a bit of a lag there, yeah, you can see that. Anyway, is when there's a delay on the keyboard, it just drives me nuts, but under the screen there's actually heat sensors, so if you consistently mistype and mishit, the Z10 will actually learn where you usually hit when you're aiming for a particular key over time and make life easier for you. So hopefully Slick will talk about that during his impressions of the phone, and yeah, that should be just like absolutely awesome. So let's show some of the basic gestures. So let's go back to, see, it's funny because I still don't know how to use it at all, so I think it's from one side, Blackberry Hub, so that takes you to the Hub, you can add accounts. Hub is cool because it allows you to bring all of your messaging together, whether it's Facebook, SMS, or whatever else, and then besides just showing you everything at the same time, you can also filter out the things that you don't want to see. Let's just go ahead and lock the phone so that I can start from scratch here. All right, so let's do a tour of the gestures that are the main gestures, so we are unlocking the phone up here, actually here's something, even when you're in sleep, you can unlock the phone by, nope, yeah, there we go, very cool. So you don't actually have to press the hard unlock button, you can have it just locked and going up from the bottom unlocks it, or you can see the lock screen which will give you a preview of any notifications that you have, as well as allow you to access your camera without actually unlocking the phone entirely. So then we do the same thing in order to do that, so multitasking is accessed by scrolling up from the bottom, and from there you can actually see some of the things that I have open, including search settings, calendar. Now this is a funny one, the browser is open, but you can see it sideways, this is a bit of a weird thing, where if you leave an app sideways and get this, okay, so you scroll up from the bottom now and it opens up multi-tags, it's in portrait, really, so you have to take your phone and go like this, and then it leaves that app actually in landscape mode. So there's some funny things that you know what, for those of you watching the video, this is an unboxing, I am not a BlackBerry 10 expert by any stretch of the imagination, but these are things that are already a little bit unintuitive for someone who's coming from a few other major smartphone platforms that I'm pretty familiar with now. So anyway, so there's that, from the lock screen, downswipe puts it in bedside mode, which I personally think is really cool, it basically just turns your phone into a clock and then gives you easy access to alarms, it's these kinds of productivity-focused things, see there's a little clock, you can turn your notifications on or off, there you go, well, whatever, they were off before, now they're apparently, I don't know, somewhere, and then you can turn your alarm on and off just by doing this, which I think is really neat, and you get rid of that just by scrolling up and getting rid of it. The other thing too is when the phone's not unlocked, again, these are very product... right, multitasking, then we can, that's it there, as an Android user and an iOS user, that's unintuitive to me, on both of the previous major platforms that I've used, scrolling down from the top lets me access my quick settings and my notifications regardless, so there you go, we have to be in the multitasking menu, so rotation lock Wi-Fi, notifications, alarms, Bluetooth and settings are all accessible from within here. Now, moving over to your, I guess whatever it's called, app drawer, right, is just scrolling to the right, so you can see all your apps at launch, they had 70,000 apps, I don't know how many they have now, but at least they have sort of the critical ones, things like Facebook and Twitter, which were missing first-party apps when Windows Phone 8 launched, at least I think one or two of them were. Same thing with YouTube, where Windows Phone 8 was missing a native, well, okay, there was a native app written by someone in collaboration with Microsoft, but it wasn't a Google app, and that was really missing then. Okay, swiping, oh yeah, so from within any app, so let's go back to here, so no matter where we are, we can go into our multitasking here, this is a vastly inferior thing compared to the Android experience that I've been having, so when you go to here, I can see, I don't need such a large preview of the browser thing that I had open or whatever else, I prefer this approach where I have nine things, and I understand that the larger 4.7-inch 1080p screen versus a 4.3-inch 720p screen enables that, but it's considering that they're in the same sort of price bracket, I would consider that a much superior way of doing multitasking, but once you're in here, you can preview your messages just by holding, and then if you gesture from left to right off the screen, you can access the BlackBerry Hub, which as you can see, I did a quick test between me, myself, and I of the text messaging, and then I can also see my text messages, my BlackBerry Messenger, and the Hub, which sort of, once you add the account, puts everything in there. And then phone dialing, so BlackBerry hasn't forgotten that this is a phone, so the first thing that you're going to see every time you scroll up from, or swipe up from the bottom, is going to be phone, search, and camera, these are sort of the most critical, these are the things I use most often on my phone, with the exception of search, I really don't use that that much, I usually just open a browser, but phone is great to have there, you can't dial by number, unfortunately, so if I put in Linus, that's not going to work, this is a great feature on Android, I use it all the time, I almost never look at my contact list anymore, because I can just dial people by name, outstanding, every platform should have it, and that is a very, very unfortunate thing, but apparently searching contacts is quick, according to some of the sort of anecdotal evidence that I've read about, but honestly, I don't see this being any quicker than what I already had on iOS, which is not as fast as just dialing it in. The new BlackBerry Messenger includes video calls and screen sharing, as long as you have enough data for it, and of course, the feature that makes BlackBerry BlackBerry is the security, so BlackBerry Balance, unlike Samsung's Knox, which is their bring your own device to work initiative, for having an employer accessible sort of corporate section of the phone, when you bring your own device, and then your own personal one, and they can't talk to each other, BlackBerry Balance has been around for years, and is very, very well regarded in that respect, so I think that's pretty much it, that covers what you guys probably need to know about the Z10, that isn't going to be covered by Slick when he goes cold turkey on Android with his S3, I'm taking your S3. What? Yep, no S3 for you. That was not part of the deal, I'm hiding it. You're going, you're going Z10. I'm hiding it. No, you're going Z10, and thank you for watching this video, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.