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BlackBerry 10 Review: Good, But Too Late?
An anonymous reader writes "Ars has an extensive review of the newly-released BlackBerry 10 operating system. Since it's such a late entry into the market, the tech community has been eyeballing the new operating system with trepidation — would all that time go to waste with a poor offering, or would BlackBerry 10 be a reasonable alternative to iOS and Android? Well, it seems BlackBerry (the company formerly known as RIM) actually put the time to good use. The review finds most of the UI innovations to actually be.. innovative. "BlackBerry took a lot of time to see what the competition is doing, and then it worked to refine its operating system. It essentially had an excellent cheat sheet, filled with everything that has worked wonderfully and all the things that have bombed. That said, BlackBerry still has to mold its product for its two huge core audiences: the business-oriented multi-tasker and the developing smartphone markets. To that end, it has included all of the essential features and apps to appeal to both of those parties. The corporate user has his or her share of content to watch on the train ride to work, games and apps to help keep busy when not entrenched in a meeting, and the perfect Hub for messaging (not to mention the literal split between work and personal environments)." However, the review also notes that the system is not really designed to make people drop their Android or iOS devices, so uptake is going to be slow at best. The question for the platform's success (and the company's) is no longer 'Is it any good? but 'Is it too late?'"
There's also a review of the z10 smartphone itself.
Blackberry's name is built on security for those messages.
Which is a fallacy.
By default, large enterprise-level organizations end up not setting up their own encryption key on BBMs, because if they did, their messages couldn't be read outside of their organization. Unfortunately, their BES system is not smart enough to specially encrypt only some messages, and not encrypt others. The same goes for non-Enterprise BBM users, their BBMs do not get any protection aside from the one default encryption key which is used by all Blackberry servers and therefore can be read by any and all Blackberry phones.
Combine that with the fact that Blackberry centralizes all emails and BBMs to go through its own centralized servers in Canada, the UK, the US, and Australia, even if you're just sending a BBM to a person sitting across from you in a non-Anglo country. And it's no wonder that several European countries believe that RIM (now Blackberry) is just a front for the US/UK/Canadian/Australian Echelon program.