search by application—to e-mail,
calendar, You Tube or Google Web
search, for instance.
Unfortunately, several terrible
user experiences from previous
BB OS iterations remain. The
Exchange mail experience is still
woefully incomplete: Unless the
device is connected to a BES, it
lacks calendar, contact and task
synchronization.
However, in version 6, RIM made
some small but annoying changes.
For instance, RIM reversed the
functionality of the “P” and “N”
hot keys in the mail application, so
now pressing “P” moves up the list,
whereas the same key would move
down the list in version 5.
I’m also puzzled about why
RIM would change certain hot-key
functionality in the e-mail application, which could confuse longtime
BlackBerry users moving to the new
OS. I expect that RIM will continue
to offer models running BB 6 OS
that don’t have a touch screen, so
hot keys will continue to be necessary for fast access around the
device.
I was also extremely disappointed
to see that BB 6 OS still requires
an operating system reboot when
upgrading or removing third-party
applications. This is a major detractor given how long BlackBerrys
typically take to fully reboot. ´
Senior Analyst Andrew Garcia can be
reached at agarcia@eweek.com.
This story can be found
online at:
tinyurl.com/34mc6al
Social Feeds aggregates incoming social
media posts and instant messaging
sessions into a single unified stream.
Clicking a post reverts back to the native application.
