BlackBerry 10 is built around a handful of basic concepts and
gestures, some of which would be difficult to discover without a
tutorial, yet seem obvious once you've mastered them. That is to say the
OS is not especially intuitive, but it works well and makes sense
despite that fact.
Since there are no physical navigation buttons on the phone and no
persistent onscreen navigation, gestures are used to move through the
software. There are really two main gestures required to get around: a
swipe up from the bottom of the screen, which brings you to your
homescreen no matter where you are, and a swipe up, hold, and slide to
the right to reveal (or "peek" at) your BlackBerry z10 Hub, a unified
notification area which also doubles as your inbox for email, text
messages, and more. That gesture takes a little getting used to — think
of it like the beginning of a McDonald's "M" arch.BB10 can best be thought of as an operating system with four main states: on your homescreen, in an application, in your messages (BlackBerry Hub), or in your app drawer.
The "center" of the phone is a unique take on the homescreen, a page representing your currently running applications (up to eight only) in a grid of large, rectangular icons. Those icons sometimes do double duty as widgets, switching over to glanceable information (like the current weather) once you minimize the application. From that screen, you can swipe left to a rather standard list of application icons and folders, or if you swipe to the right, you get your BlackBerry Hub. The only other consistent state is within an application itself.
The interface shares much in common with Android and iOS, and at times feels like a hybrid of the two. While you do have some widget functionality on your homescreen, it's strictly controlled and tied to running apps. The application drawer functions almost identically to iOS', allowing you to slide icons around and drop them into folders as the system automatically rearranges your grid.
The homescreen concept is interesting, but failed to convince me that
it was a better solution than what Android proposes. The idea that an
app can become to a widget when not running is novel, but you have no
sense of which app will become a widget, and you have no control
over whether or not that widget will always be visible. In fact, you
have no control over your multitasking / homescreen arrangement save for
the fact that you can kill a process. The apps order, or if they stay
in place, is determined simply by which one you've most recently had
open. And once you get to app nine... your old apps are dismissed
unceremoniously.The end result is a feeling of unpredictability. Not only can you not control which apps remain open or where they're located, you also don't have a consistent sense of where to find certain pieces of information. If you're like me, you like to be able to glance at things like the weather quickly and conveniently — even Apple gets this one kind of right in iOS' Notification Center — but BlackBerry 10 provides no such option.
source :http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/30/3929760/blackberry-z10-review
