New RIM’s operational system BlackBerry 10 has been announced for this fall, and already there are a lot of reactions from their consumers who have been looking forward to something new from this company. This OS is promising some interesting new features, and that the mistakes that have made BlackBerry 7 become less than popular will not be repeated. We can hope that they have learned from their mistakes and that devoted BlackBerry users will be rewarded for deciding to stick with this company through difficult times. Even though forecasts look good, there still are some issues to be resolved. Whether mobile stores will be making a killing with new Rim phones depends on the ability of BlackBerry to overcome some of the problems that they were having, luckily they do seem to have a lot of interesting new things to offer.
One of the potentially very useful innovations that the BlackBerry’s OS will be offering to its users is a new way of managing active applications. Most users have been irritated by the fact that you usually needed to close the app that you are currently using if you want to activate another one. This made it difficult to perform tasks that included working on more than one application, and was less than practical for even everyday use. BlackBerry will be solving this problem by allowing the users to minimize the applications to the sidebar, and quickly recall them when needed BlackBerry has long been faithful to physical keyboards on their mobile phones, but that doesn’t mean that they are not handling touch keyboards well. One of the features they have been working on is meant to help you type significantly faster. The software will try to predict what word will you be needing next, and offer you to type it just by pressing the first letter of the word. These types of text prediction are constantly being researched with more or less success, the fact is, you don’t know exactly how useful it will be before you try it out for yourself.
They have also put some work in their camera software. When taking a picture you will be able to access the image buffer of the camera and modify the picture you have taken with some of the details caught before snapping the shot. It is similar to choosing a particular frame from a video recording. Something like this has already been done, but BlackBerry has taken this technology one step further by allowing you to compose the picture you need by assembling different details from a number of images made prior to actually taking the shot.
For the time being, the greatest problem that they seem to be facing is related to the app development. BlackBerry 7 wasn’t really popular with app developers, and this might hurt this project. Transferring to a new platform is not a small undertaking, and the developers need to make sure that it will be worth their while before taking this step. BlackBerry’s current state of affairs regarding apps is not exactly great, they lack a lot of essential apps, and it seems that they are having problems with having the apps made without them directly paying the developers. This is not sustainable for longer periods of time, and if the developers are not willing to take a bit of risk with the new OS, the future might be grim for BlackBerry.