BlackBerry 6 OS Breaks No New Ground: Review

Applications

In a nod toward the rise of social networking, the new Social Feeds application aggregates content from the user’s Facebook, Twitter and configured instant messaging accounts and alerts to the Notification bar of incoming items. While I found Social Feeds provided a nice overview stream from all my various communities, the app also proved redundant and extraneous. Clicking on an item in the stream within Social Feeds takes the user back to the BlackBerry-native application for the post (like the updated, but still comparatively terrible BlackBerry Facebook app). And most of the underlying applications also alert independently to the Notification bar, as well, making things quite cluttered.

The home screen is now broken into five distinct screens accessible by side scrolling. While the All screen is most analogous to older BlackBerry OS versions – on the Torch, a jumble of 38 applications and settings organised as if by tornado – there are now four other screens for simplified navigation. The Frequent screen dynamically organises icons, migrating the most commonly used applications to the top. Favorites, meanwhile, allows the user to define their own set of common applications. Additional screens for media and downloads round out the set.

As before, users can modify the All screen with the familiar process of using the BlackBerry key and on-screen menus to create folders and move things around. Even though the touch controls in BB 6 OS were much better on the Torch than for previous models such as the Storm, the touch feature could not be used to edit screen layout, which I thought was a significant letdown.

Browser

Without a doubt the most welcome improvement in BlackBerry 6 OS is the new Webkit-based web browser. Although it breaks little new ground when it comes to mobile web browsing, at least BlackBerry finally has an intuitive, well-organised, built-in browser. I hope never to see another “Request Entity Too Large” error from a BlackBerry again.

Search is vastly improved, taking a hint from webOS and allowing users to search on the device or on the web simply by starting to type on the home screen. Built-in intelligence figures out by the keys pressed that the user is not trying to dial the phone, and the OS pops up application icons possibly relevant for the search. By pressing on one of these icons, the user can filter the search by application–filtering down to just email, calendar, YouTube or Google Web search, for instance.

Several terrible user experiences from previous BB OS iterations remain, unfortunately. The Exchange mail experience is still woefully incomplete if the device is not connected to a BES, still lacking calendar, contact and task synchronization.

I was also puzzled why RIM would change certain hotkey functionality in the email, which could serve to confuse longtime BlackBerry users moving to the new OS. I expect that RIM will continue to offer models running BB 6 OS that don’t have a touch screen, so hotkeys will continue to be necessary for fast access around the device, but in version 6, RIM made some small but annoying changes. For instance, I found that RIM reversed the functionality of the “P” and “N” hotkeys in the mail application, so now pressing “P” moves up the list, whereas the same key would move down the list in version 5.

I was also extremely disappointed to see that BB 6 OS still requires an operating system reboot when upgrading or removing third-party applications – a major detractor given how long BlackBerrys typically take to fully reboot.