RIM is continuing its trek towards BlackBerry 10 with a bang not a whimper, and the next step on that road is showing off the home and app screens.
The emphasis here is on quick and fluid multitasking; to that end they have created four windows, each with live apps inside of them. This is similar to the way the PlayBook can show apps running live in the background, but we’re guessing RIM is going to spruce them up to act a bit more like widgets. As you can see from the photo above, with BlackBerry 10 running on pre-production alpha hardware, the user has quick-glance access to weather, calendar information and the current song playing.
The next step is to use gestures to navigate between screens and applications. A swipe right from the home screen brings up the app icon list (ignore the repeated music, calendar and pictures icons) which will scroll vertically. We get the impression that these icons will be very high-resolution and, like the PlayBook, be customizable on a grid.
Swiping left from the home screen brings up the unified Inbox, which seems to combine email, SMS messages, BBMs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media into one pane. It also looks like another swipe brings you either into another app or what looks to be a calendar widget of some sort.
Gestures will be consistent and accessible throughout the operating system, according to RIM. These will become like second nature, and allow for fluid one-handed operation for most tasks. One of these important gestures is “looking type,” whereby you hold your thumb on the bottom right side of the screen which causes everything to zoom out for an over-arching view of the action.
As for the keyboard, RIM has confirmed that they are working with the makers of SwiftKey to improve the intelligent auto-correct and learning algorithms. The company also claims to be working with Scalado on its camera “rewind” feature.
What do you think of all this news? Has RIM piqued your interest?
