What’s new in Blackberry 10.2

I’d heard so much leading up to the release of Black Berry 10.2 Operating System for the Z10 I was anxious to get it. The Q10 and Z30 already have it. It finally rolled out and now I get to see what’s new, and what’s not.

Priority Hub
Blackberry’s much anticipated Priority hub is here. They have included a filtered view to the standard hub based on people you define (or it figures out) are important. But that’s all it is. A filtered view. Sadly they left out the ability to notify only on the priority hub so that’s still not solved. I so miss the Gmail Priority Inbox to filter out less important stuff. The only other thing you can do with the priority inbox is turn Instant previews on or off for people in the priority inbox.

So to get around this what I do is go into customized settings for the noticfictions for the people that are important and add a custom tone, and vibration for them. A bit of a pain, but at least I can tell when something is important. Then I use an app that I really like called eBuzz Pro. This allows me to then add reminders for missed messages as well as change the color of the notification LED for important people. A bit of a pain to setup but it does work.

Instant Preview
Blackberry have made a major improvement by adding an instant preview. When a message comes in a small bar comes down from the top to see your new message, click it and it takes you right to the new message. Very nice! Sorta reminds me of Android 🙂

They have added Android 4 app support, but I found only 1 app that didn’t use to work that now does.

What’s not changed:
No change to notification LED, still only red.
Still no keep screen on
Still no USB on the go (could be a hardware limitation)
Still not calendar view
No improvement to the dialer, lookup or favorites view
No ExFAT

Here’s a thorough list of what’s new.

So all in all 10.2 is a nice incremental step forward but still work to be done.