BlackBerry Diaries: day one

I'd expected setting up the BlackBerry Q10 to be a fairly long and involved process. I was half right.

It was long, but only because of the time I needed to download the major OS updates that had occurred since the Q10 phone hit the market. But it certainly wasn't that involved.

I already had a BlackBerry account so that may have helped, but it was the ease of adding my work and personal accounts that impressed me. Both CNET and I favour using Gmail and the Q10 was more than happy to accommodate.

I've found BlackBerry Hub -- the single stream that collects all your messages from texts, email, Facebook etc -- to be pretty effective and really quite a useful way of imparting all the information you need to know.

There has been a little weirdness. My calendar, for example, blocks out the times when I have appointments, but doesn't have any of the information, such as address or contact numbers or even what the appointment is related to. I've also got most of my phone contacts imported over from Google, but there's a few that just didn't come for some reason, and it's not clear why.

The screen size feels absolutely miniscule compared to my Note 3, but I've quickly got back into the rhythm of the physical keyboard - the clicky-click noise of typing is rather soothing, although I'm probably a little bit quicker using Swiftkey.

App-wise, while I was impressed with eCoffeecard being present (ensuring I don't miss out on being rewarded for my caffeine addiction), I did miss a Spotify app. The solid integration of the Twitter and Facebook apps makes getting notifications -- messages, mentions etc -- very easy, but the lack of widgets makes it harder to just flick through my extensive feeds from those particular social networks.

(As a side note, I'm missing TripView Sydney. It's not that it isn't on the BlackBerry World store -- it is -- I just haven't set up a payment method so I can spend the AU$2.99 to buy it. I'll stop being so cheap and do that tomorrow.)

Battery life has seemed a little weird -- the Q10 dropped to 50 per cent in what seemed like quite a short time, but hasn't lost more than 8 percent since then, despite high usage. I'll see how this looks tomorrow, but I guess I'd say that battery life has been good.

In all, I've been pretty impressed by today. There are two things I'd change. One is being able to clear all unread messages from the Hub, just to let it know that I know there are messages and it can calm down about them.

The second is a bit bigger: my Jawbone Up24. I love it and I can't access any of the data I'm recording -- it's app-based and it's iOS and Android only. Unlike Fitbit, there's not even a desktop interface. This is a big deal for me, so I'm hoping this won't be the fitness tracking straw that breaks the camel's BlackBerry back...