by Stephanie Yaipen, staff reporter
Research in Motion (RIM), the company that is now officially BlackBerry, according to Times. On April 2010, the RIM decided, with the help of QNX (the maker of a highly-regarded, industrial-strength operating system used for applications such as car electronics and medical devices), to make a new blackberry cell phone. This project took years, and had many delays on the way. The new cellphones made are the Blackberry Z10 and the Blackberry Q10.
The Blackberry Z10 is a touch screen phone, and it will be sold by AT&T, Sprint, T-Moible, and Verizon starting in March in the US. So far, only Verizon has revealed a price, $199 with a two year contract and $599 unlocked.
The Z10 is more modern since it is not based on outdated hardware. It has a 4.2” screen, and it has a density of 356 pixels per inch which makes it a bit better than the iPhone 5. It has a 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 2 megapixel camera in the front for video calls. It’s LTE 4G wireless broadband compatible and has 16GB of storage with a MicroSD slot for more memory.
The Blackberry Q10 will arrive later in the year, this phone is not a full touch screen it has a keyboard as well. This helps blackberry users ease into the new technology by having both touchscreen and keyboard.
“I’m tired of touch screen; sometimes my fingers touch the wrong button and sometimes my iPhone screen is very slow, so I wouldn’t mind having a keyboard to type in,” junior Stephanie Deanero said.
These phones will need plenty of new apps to catch iPhone and Android fans, since the phone does not currently contain, Bejeweled, Flipboard, Hipstagram, Hulu Plus, Instagram, Netflix, Temple Run and YouTube (apps & games) yet, according to here.
“I am not a big fan of Blackberry. I love my iPhone, but this new Blackberry Z10 sounds pretty cool and modern,” junior Asad Arif said.
Blackberry has been building a mobile operating system that is exciting and functional. This allows people to do much of their communication in the BlackBerry Hub, an uber-app that connects e-mail, phone calls, updates from Facebook and Twitter, text messaging and BlackBerry Messenger, which now does video calls and instant messaging.
For more information on the new Blackberry, check out this link.