New York Magazine's Roose calls BlackBerry Z10 "a piece of crap"

New York Magazine is not the first place that smartphone fanatics go for a review of the latest and greatest handsets (as if we had to tell you where you should go first). But in its desire to capture press attention which leads to buzz, which leads to sales, BlackBerry's PR firm made sure that every publication, even ones not focused on tech, received a BlackBerry Z10 review unit (we are eagerly awaiting to see what Highlights says about the phone in between the regular installments of Goofus and Gallant and the Timbertoes).  Unfortunately, the demo unit received by New York Magazine Tech/Finance author Kevin Roose passed away after four days, which is not exactly what BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins would want to see in the press. We don't know if Roose had been assigned to pen a review of the device,but with the death of the demo unit, Roose decided to author a mock eulogy to his late Z10.

Mr. Roose at first mentioned how revolutionary he heard the Z10 was going to be with 70,000 apps (we hope this was meant as a joke considering the 700,000+ apps in the App Store) and BlackBerry Balance. The latter is actually a great feature as it allows one unit to be used at home and the office and in this era of BYOD, it gives an employee's IT manager the ability to disable and block apps from being loaded without permission. Set the phone to home settings, and any app you want becomes available. This is BlackBerry's way to try to make up for all of those Apple iPhone and Android models that are being brought into the work force.

After 102 hours, the demo unit died and could not be revived even with mouth to USB attempted. Obviously frustrated, Roose laid into BlackBerry 10 for its failure to offer popular apps like Instagram, Skype and Netflix. Ironically, this weekend, Skype posted a note on its blog that a BlackBerry 10 version of Skype is coming, which is being ported from the Android app. and there are various reports that Netflix is now available in BlackBerry World. Roose said that the whole experience with the Z10 made him feel like he was going back to 2008, a year he loved. 

Roose ended up calling the phone "a piece of crap," which might seem overdone. First of all, he could have simply asked for a new unit to replace the one that died. Had he suffered through the launch of the BlackBerry Storm in 2008? Now that was a disaster of biblical proportions.


We invite New York Magazine readers who want to see a real review on the BlackBerry Z10 to check out ours by clicking on the link.

source: NewYorkMagazine