post by GmyDotCom
The really funny thing about this question is that the short answer could very well be? looking very much like the iphone. Not the iphone as in its physical form; rather, the new BlackBerry OS has taken on some of the user interfaces & gestures of its competitor into heart.
The old & faithful full-QWERTY keypad is still there on most BlackBerry Smartphones. That's what a BlackBerry is really all about: the facility that allows tapping on a full set of keys. Then again, is that full-QWERTY still there? Things Change, & BlackBerry has been going with the flow. & this flow transcribe to a smaller keypad now. On some new BlackBerry smartphones, a key would do the work of two keys now.
These days, desirable smartphones got to have touchscreen capability too. So, in came the innovation of touchscreen into new BlackBerry smartphones, especially the Storm. Released more than a year back, BlackBerry Storm was RIM's first touchscreen device. It didn't even have any physical keyboard.
Not only just touchscreen. The new OS brings us multitouch. You can now do pinch & zoom when running the BlackBerry's browser. This is also applied to the picture viewer. As for the gestures to use on other user interfaces, there seems to be some kind of tapping the display to select a menu & swiping to go to the next generation.
Besides this, BlackBerry 6.0 supports gestured & others like kinetic scrolling & rubber banding. Rubber banding makes the screen "bounce" at the top & bottom when you do flick scrolling right up to the ends. And you can preprogram "momentum" to the scrolling, so that after swiping, the pages keep on gliding to a gradual stop. Now where have we seen this before?
Using gestures you can also bring up some new modal popups. To pop up an icon set of menu that has context menu items, just tap & hold on a display. These contextual menus pop up in the middle of the screen as a box. They don't just appear down from the top-left corner any more. To get notification, you do a pull-down gesture.
What's nice about this kind of touch features is even if a Blackberry has no touchscreen, you can still apply similar touch gestured onto an optical trackpad. This is like killing two bids with one stone.
The hype about the new Blackberry OS is the key words for the images: "crisp" icons. Apparently the graphics have gone through some drastic overhaul. So these "crisp" icons & graphics are more animated & have transaction.
These new images live in a new Home screen. You can get multiple views, depending on the content type. As for more animated graphics, the new OS utilizes animation APIs that can animate practically anything in the screen, & the animation is optimized natively.
There is a useful app currently for the BlackBerry to create shortcuts, call ShortCutMe. Now, you don't need it, as the new OS can do this natively.
BlackBerry's new media player copies the way album covers enlarge in the middle as you swipe left or right, when selecting an album to play.
The camera on a device running this new OS will not just shoot pictures & videos, The barcode reading facility is still there. & new barcode enhancements has made the camera's viewfinder scan barcodes of such new formats as 1D(UPC, ITF-14) & 2D (Data Matrix, QR Code).
The new OS utilizes a special cellsite geolocation API which can activate on location services, & which uses crowd sourced data for cell tower positions.
