Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the BB10 for a few months now, building software for the launch. I was extremely skeptical at first, but after the push to launch, I have a lot of positive things to say about the device and the OS.

1) Its fast, memory management isn't an issue for developers like it is on Android or even iOS.

2) Its smooth and multitasks well. QNX does deliver here big time.

3) Its solid -- during the Alpha and Beta stages, I never had a crash -- this is, looking back, astounding.

4) Native development is not as demanding as Android or iOS. The dev ecosystem guides you well to just the right balance between native UI elements and customization and you can do it in a language you likely already have knowledge of. (Java, QT, HTML5, C++)

Overall -- it was a pleasure to build and launch apps on BB10 -- which is more than I have to say for other ecosystems. I'd describe it as the the ease of developing the display layer for a Windows Phone app mixed with the flexibility and depth of an Android app and the power of iPhone hardware.

Background: I'm a hardcore iPhone user who is in the mobile industry and regularly uses hundreds of mobile devices.

> "memory management isn't an issue for developers like it is on Android or even iOS."

Memory Management is a issue on android development? Ive been dev'ing for android for > 2 years and i have never had a memory management issue. Not saying there isnt one, but i would imagine you would have to be doing something wrong for it to be an issue.

> " Native development is not as demanding as Android"

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "demanding"? The vast majority of android apps happily spend there entire lives never touching native code...

Up until 4.0-ish you didn't have great native UI libraries and so forth to help you quickly put together a native app w/o designing a UI library from the ground up.

Memory managment was a pain in the butt when I was developing for Android. Mainly because apps (then) were limited to a 16MB heap and bitmaps would allocate memory automatically but need to "reminded" to release it afterwards. The only real way to know if you'd exceeded the limit when you tried to open a bitmap was to catch the OutOfMemory exception and retry with a lower sampling of the image. So the simple act of trying to read an image into memory and display it turns into a complex memory management scenario. Good times.

Honestly, I never expected RIM to have such a powerful launch, BB10 really delivered where they needed to. I've been growing sick of iOS's limitations and Nexus's hardware design direction - Non user-replaceable batteries and absence of external memory cards.

Blackberry sounds interesting and for once since Symbian, I feel relieved.

From the videos I've seen before, I think BB10 handled "real multi-tasking" the best among all modern mobile OS's. Even Ubuntu for phones seemed to lag a little between switching apps. But with BB10 entering a new app seemed instantaneous. Granted Ubuntu for phones is still in alpha mode.

Also the "true multi-tasking" of BB10 may also impact the phone's battery life. So far the battery reports about Z10 haven't been that great. RIM (Blackberry now) should've tried to compensate that with a bigger battery or something.

Interestingly enough, for a contrasting position, the Verge review calls out the OS for being poor at handling multitasking:

"I don't feel BlackBerry 10 deals with multitasking or notifications as effectively as other platforms do (most notably Android), but it's not a total strikeout." http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/30/3929760/blackberry-z10-rev...

Pretty solid selling points to be honest. I guess I might give it a try.

I'm curious, does the QNX OS on BB10 also have Dtrace?

How is the battery life? I'm tired of charging my 9900 twice a day :(

On the Verge review he stated that sometimes he could go from 9am to 6pm and the phone would be dead and other times it lasted a bit longer. I'm wondering though if this is because BB10 has real multitasking (judging by the Playbook) and any apps he leaves open are actually running.

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