BlackBerry Consumer Forum (Calgary)

The BlackBerry Consumer Forum is a travelling training event designed mostly for retail staff who will be selling BlackBerry devices. The Calgary event was held last night and there is one more stop planned for Vancouver tomorrow. There was an awesome reaction to the live demo of the BlackBerry 10 device, which was actually a Dev Alpha B. The crowd of around 100 clapped and cheered when the predictive keyboard and timeshift camera features were shown.The most exciting part of the event was near the end when they gave away a 4G PlayBook, a Porsche 9981 device (worth at least $1800), and an IOU for one of the first BB10 devices to be released.

Although most of the demonstration were things I was familiar with already, there were a few things I learned.

KeyBoard
1. One swipe from right to left on the keyboard deletes an entire word. I love this feature! No more tapping backspace over and over to get rid of a word
2. Up to 3 languages can be typed simultaneously. We have heard about the Multilanguage keyboard but this is the first I’ve heard as far as numbers
3. The keyboard not only learns what you type, but how you type as well. If you usually hit right on the edge of the H and mistakenly hit the J, the keyboard will learn and actually adjust the boundaries of the necessary keys to compensate

Browser
1. The BB10 browser scores extremely high on the html 5 test which we’ve seen before. What I didn’t realize is that the browser not only surpasses other mobile browsers, but also desktop browsers. Google Chrome scores 434 while BB10 is 476. Impressive!
2. As a side note, the PlayBook Browser on OS 2.1 is the best tablet browser when it comes to html5 with a score of 411.

Camera
1.The timeshift camera changes only the faces of those you want to. The rest of their body doesn’t move if you want to change them from blinking or not smiling to not blinking and smiling. So you’re creating a picture that never existed in the real world. Spooky!
2. There was a mention of there being filters built into the camera software but when I asked one of the trainers afterwards he could not confirm that
3. Not something new, but auto-focus! That’s what we have been missing lately!