BB10 Officially Launched- This is What Meego Should’ve Been; What Nokia can learn From BB

*The following is a mix of a rant + my personal thoughts on the BB10 launch and what Nokia can learn from it.

Just now BlackBerry are finishing up their most important launch ever; that of BB10- Without going into too much detail many are comparing BB’s current position to Nokia’s; except rather than jumping ship they’ve tried to weather the storm and hold out with their own homegrown OS. Of course no-one knows how successful this will be, and just because it might work for BB doesn’t mean it would have worked for Nokia; but the point I’m trying to make is that BB pulled it together with the launch of BB10. An OS that takes a lot of hints from Nokia’s own Meego; where the flagship device the “Z10” follows the N9 in being one of the elite few devices that is absolutely button-less.

BB10 is what Meego should’ve been two years ago; but Nokia dropped the ball with it; it wasn’t half as smooth or “classy”

— Ali Al-Qudsi (@AliQudsi) January 30, 2013

Relying totally on gestures BB10 seems like Meego re-incarnated; except it’s much more than that, what differentiates the two is the fact that BB10 is “complete” (or so it seems from afar). The launch of BB10 so far or perhaps the “delivery” has been flawless. Granted the CEO “Heins” looked a bit like a lanky goofy on stage besides their hardware engineer “Vivek Bhardwaj” who absolutely brilliant; he was well composed, knew his stuff and had just enough “funny” in him to keep you interested.

Looking past that at the actual “preparedness” for the launch; although BB10 was delayed countless times it certainly appears to have been worth it- rather than releasing a half baked software/device to satisfy customers RIM buckled down, but delay after delay seems to have payed off. Today alongside the launch they announced 70,000 apps in the new Blackberry marketplace; regardless of the quality that’s a high number; but even better they had some big names in the app business Available already. For example Skype, Angry Birds Starwars, Jetpack Joyride (which was promised for WP8 months ago and still hasn’t come), Whatsapp and more are ALREADY IN THE STORE! Something even Microsoft who owns Skype couldn’t get right for their own launch!

Not only did they have a great delivery of the products, (two phones only; the Z10 & Q10) but they were able to announce the new features they had in store, such as screen-sharing over video chat, efficiently and without repeating the feature a million times. And the icing on the cake was the fact that they provided a pricing, availability and next day release! Yes! you can literally walk into a store tomorrow and buy a Z10.

Looking at another aspect of BB10; the “Blackberry Hub” which is exactly like the People Hub in Windows Phone, except it’s so much prettier; BB Hub shows you all recent events from a specific contact (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Email Text etc.) but it does it without losing the “look” of each network. That way it keeps a distinction between the different forms of contact and it just looks a lot more polished than the people hub.

At the risk of going on for another 3 hours I’m going to end by saying that even though the BB10 launch was severely delayed, Nokia could do well to take a few pointers from it; especially when it comes to organizing the followups of the event; oh did I mention that BB had 5 events going on across the globe simultaneously; where they were able to video call another event live on stage? Or the fact that the video cast live stream never cut out a single time while playing (for anyone)… It’s the little things that count.

Oh and that Z10 in white… is ridiculously gorgeous:

Category: Nokia