The Google Nexus 4 Android smartphone hardly needs and introduction. It's Google's latest and greatest contract-free, pure Google experience phone, and it's very reasonably priced at $299 for the 8 gig and $349 for the 16 gig. For that price you get a cutting edge Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core CPU running at 1.5GHz, 2 gigs of RAM and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (both OS 4.1 and 4.2 are called Jelly Bean, but you won't find 4.2 on anything other than a Google Nexus just yet). The Nexus 4 is made by LG and shares much of its internals with the excellent LG Optimus G.

The Nexus 4 is a good looking phone with curves that make it more hand-friendly. It has the usual glass front and a glass back with a subtle pattern than you'll see when you waggle it back and forth in the light. The sides are a dense plastic that should absorb bumps, but as we've learned from the iPhone 4, it's a good idea to protect a phone that wears glass front and back.

This is a GSM world phone and that means it works on T-Mobile and AT&T here in the US. It will not work on Sprint or Verizon. It's quad band GSM and pentaband 3G HSPA+ (our US carriers market this as 4G but it's really a very fast form of 3G). That means you'll get 3G on both AT&T and T-Mobile. It lacks LTE, which isn't a big deal globally since many countries don't yet have serious LTE deployments, but here in the US and Canada where LTE is mature it is a serious drawback. It's simply hard to go back to HSPA+ where data speeds are sometimes pretty good at 12Mbps but more often drop to 4 or 5 MBps down, vs. LTE's 25 Mbps. But that does make it a good phone for T-Mobile, since that carrier currently lacks a 4G LTE network. In fact, T-Mobile is offering the phone with contract ($199 for the 16 gig), but that contract price is only saving you $150 on the phone itself over the course of 2 years.

The phone has an excellent 4.7" bonded Gorilla Glass 2 curved display running at 1280 x 768. This is an IPS display with natural colors and an impressive 320 ppi pixel density (just a few ppi behind the Nokia Lumia 920 and iPhone 5s, but ahead of most other smartphones by a wider margin). Text looks painted on as it does with the HTC One X and iPhone 5: lovely!

We expected the Nexus 4 to be the fastest Android smartphone yet since it runs on the S4 Pro processor (only the Optimus G and HTC Droid DNA run on that new quad core CPU) and it has a pure version of Android 4.2 with no overlays to slow it down. But on synthetic benchmarks, it was bested by the other two smartphones. It still feels very much like a fast phone, and we have a feeling that as Google refines OS 4.2 (which also feels a little less zippy on our Nexus 7 tablet compared to 4.1.1) it will really fly.

There are laptops, and then there are ThinkPads. Robust notebooks with a soft touch raven black finish and the best keyboard in the business. So when Lenovo releases a ThinkPad Ultrabook, we take notice. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is Lenovo's first official ThinkPad Ultrabook. Yes, they released the original ThinkPad X1 in May of 2011, but it weighed nearly 4 pounds, had full mobile rather than ULV CPUs and didn't go by the then nonexistent Ultrabook handle.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is both thoroughly Ultrabook and ThinkPad. It has the unmistakable look of a ThinkPad and that mil spec solidness that says "go ahead, drop me a few times". It runs on Intel Ivy Bridge ULV CPUs (your choice of Core i5 and Core i7) with Intel HD 4000 graphics and it weighs just 3 pounds. Unlike the small but powerful 12.5" Lenovo ThinkPad X230, the X1 Carbon is one of the thinner machines on the planet at 0.31-0.71 inches. It has dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a 3G SIM card slot and a 720p webcam.

The ThinkPad Carbon X1 starts at $1,399 for the base 1.7 GHz Core i5-3317U with a 128 gig SSD. The Core i7 2.0GHz with VPro and a 256 gig SSD is $1,849. There are a few configurations in between, and all start with 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM (8 gigs is max). But don't lose heart: Lenovo often has aggressive sales that save you 10 percent or more.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a 14" laptop with a 13.3" footprint. It has a 1600 x 900 display with wide viewing angles and 300 nits of brightness. And it's a matte display, goodbye glare! Lenovo addresses two complaints with the outgoing X1: no high res option and no matte option since it was clad in durable but mirror-like Gorilla Glass. Though the X1 Carbon's display can't compete with Asus Zenbook Prime 1080p IPS matte displays, it's one of the better non-IPS displays found on notebooks. It has fairly wide viewing angles, a very large horizontal sweet spot for optimal viewing and good (though not great) colors. The display has a slight blue tint and warmer tones like oranges and reds don't pop as they do on the IPS version of the X230. Still, we'd opt for the 14" X1 Carbon vs. 12.5" X230 display for both size and resolution.

The X1 Carbon has a carbon rather than magnesium alloy roll cage inside (hence the name) and it's passed 8 Mil-Spec tests for cold, heat, dust, humidity, altitude and vibration. The shell is also carbon fiber, and as we've learned from high end Sony Vaio notebooks, this allows for a much lighter product. The X1 Carbon has one USB 2.0 port and one USB 3.0 port. It has a mini DisplayPort and a 3.5mm audio jack. Lenovo, like Asus, included a USB 10/100 Ethernet adapter in the box. We're honestly surprised Lenovo didn't fit a few more ports in this 14" chassis.

There's no HDMI port, but you can buy a mini Display Port to HDMI adapter for $20 to $30. Likewise there are VGA adapters on the market for those who use legacy projectors and older monitors. Thus the DisplayPort is very versatile and it can drive very high resolution displays that exceed 1920 x 1200, unlike many HDMI-equipped laptops. The notebook has small stereo speakers and Dolby Home Theater v4 audio that produces good volume but somewhat harsh and thin sound through the built-in speakers. Headphone audio is much more pleasing and full.

There are two camps of people: ThinkPad people and those who think that ThinkPads look dull and chunky. Even if you're in the latter category, you'll likely think this is one cool looking notebook. It's murderously thin and not deadly dull. It's no Mac clone and it stands out from the horde of silver Ultrabooks. It's sleek yet sturdy looking and the surface is a pleasure to touch. It also cleans easily: a damp cloth removes fingerprint oils from the matte surface. It's also the most rugged Ultrabook on the market (excluding products from companies that specialize in rugged products for verticals and the military). Like all ThinkPads, drops and bumps rarely result in damage.

With the X1 to X1 Carbon size reduction, we lost the dock connector and battery sheet option. Both are common Lenovo ThinkPad features, and I know some of you are disappointed and might even have to pass on this otherwise lovely machine because there's no way to extend runtimes in the field with a sheet battery and the main battery is sealed inside.

Like the Lenovo ThinkPad X230, the X1 Carbon has Lenovo's recently revised 6 row keyboard design, and we like it. Ancient keys like SysRq have been banished, and the PrtSc (print screen) key is now at the lower right rather than at the top row. The delete key is at the top right corner where it belongs, just above the oversized backspace key. The roomy Chiclet style keyboard has oversized enter, shift and left control keys. Key travel and tactile feel are superb for such a thin machine. Sculpted keys that aren't too slick or too sticky round out an excellent typing experience. The X1 Carbon and Dell XPS 13 have the best keyboards among Ultrabooks, and we put the ThinkPad at the top.

The keyboard has backlighting: press the Fn and spacebar to toggle two levels of white backlight. Sorry, there's no ThinkLight LED lamp above the display to shine down on the keyboard. Typical of Lenovo, There are dedicated mute and volume buttons above the keyboard along with the ThinkVantage button for assistance and system recovery. The illuminated power button lives at the upper right just above the Fn row and a wireless indicator is beside it. The X1 Carbon has a wireless control slider on the left side.

The UltraNav combined trackpad and TrackPoint is made by Synaptics and they work very well. The trackpad is roomy (37% larger than the original X1's) and responsive for multi-touch, and is optimized for Windows 8 according to Lenovo. The TrackPoint, for those who grew up with IBM's eraser stick pointer, is there in all its glory. The TrackPoint has traditional buttons while the trackpad is the trendy buttonless glass affair. The trackpad gives a pleasing audible and tactile click when you left and right click.

Unlike the first X1 that employed full mobile CPUs, this is through and through an Ultrabook with ULV (ultra low voltage) CPUs that use less power and generate less heat than full mobile CPUs. Something has to give, and that's performance. While ULV Core i5 and i7 CPUs are more than adequate for productivity and streaming media playback, don't expect them to handle 1080p video production or 4,000 rows of Excel spreadsheet computation like their full mobile brethren.

But for those of us who use ultraportables to get everyday work done on the road, video chat on Skype, social network and kill time watching YouTube and Netflix, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is all that. With third generation Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and Intel HD 4000 graphics, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is your productivity buddy. Lenovo sent us their fastest configuration with a 2.0GHz dual core Intel i7-3667U (Turbo Boost to 3.2 GHz) 4 gigs of DDR3 1333MHz RAM and a SanDisk X100 SSD drive. Our machine benchmarked at the top of the Ultrabook heap on PCMark Vantage, thanks to Lenovo's solid internals and the faster than usual CPU (most Ultrabooks ship with either a 1.7 GHz Core i5 or a 1.9 GHz Core i7). In 3DMark Vantage, the score was average among Ultrabooks with Intel HD 4000 graphics. Since this is a business oriented machine, Lenovo didn't squeeze out extra 3D performance as Toshiba did with their widescreen Toshiba Satellite U845W that's oriented toward multimedia and light gaming.

The machine ships with Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 dual band WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n with vPro. It supports WiFi Direct connections but there's no WiDi software for wireless display. The notebook has ThinkPad (Broadcom) Bluetooth 4.0 and an unlocked Ericsson H5321 GSM 3G SIM card slot (3G on the 850/900/1900/2100MHz bands, ideal for AT&T in the US and any GSM carrier overseas). The laptop can act as a mobile hotspot and rebroadcast its WiFi or 3G connection over WiFi to serve your smartphone, other notebook or tablet.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon has a 45Wh Lithium Ion battery that's sealed inside. As mentioned, there's no external battery slice option to extend runtimes. As a consolation, the machine uses Lenovo's RapidCharge that can charge to 80% in 35 minutes. A full charge takes 1.5 hours and a 90% charge just 45 minutes. Excellent. Lenovo claims up to 6.3 hours on a charge, and in our tests over the course of a week, we averaged 5.4 hours with display brightness set to 50% and WiFi turned on in a mix of productivity and light multimedia tasks. That's at the low end of average for Ultrabooks.

You know that standard Lenovo charger with a barrel tip? Toss it in the trash or sell it on Craigslist. The X1 Carbon uses a new rectangular connector. The charger isn't among the smallest and lightest we've seen with Ultrabooks, but the high output 90w, 20v brick does charge the laptop extremely quickly.

The ThinkPad X1 has:

Second gen Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPU options (2.1 GHz i3-2310M, 2.5 GHz Core i5-2520M, 2.7 GHz Core i7-2620)
HDMI 1.4a and a Mini DisplayPort
Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 802.11n (various Intel Centrino options will be available)
Optional Bluetooth 3.0
Low light web cam with dual array mic
Stereo speakers (loud!) with Dolby Home Theater v4
SD/MMC card slot
1 USB 3.0 port
1 eSata/USB 2.0 powered combo port
No internal optical drive
250 and 320 gig 7200RPM drive options, or 128 gig SSD or 160 gig Intel SSD
Gobi WWAN and Ericsson WWAN options for 3G, WiMAX option
Fingerprint reader is standard

Lenovo loves Display Ports, and the X1 has a mini DisplayPort that can drive up to 2560 x 1600 resolution. We hooked it up to our 30" Apple HD Cinema display and it worked fine with good image quality (though contrast was a bit high by default). When driving that high a resolution, we had to disable the internal display or the ThinkPad would drop down the resolution on the monitor. The notebook has an HDMI 1.4a port but no legacy VGA port.

The internal panel is bright and colorful, and Lenovo states that it has 350 nits brightness. Indeed, we found ourselves turning down the brightness in most environments. It's covered from bezel edge to edge with Gorilla Glass, and that introduces some glare though it's not nearly as mirror-like as consumer notebooks with gloss displays. I'm not a fan of gloss displays, but the X1's didn't bother me.

This ThinkPad has a fun side, and the HDMI port works well for streaming the latest Hulu or Netflix content to an HD TV. The built-in stereo speakers are incredibly loud, and sound quality is relatively full for notebook speakers. With no internal DVD drive, you won't be watching DVDs on the road, but you can load iTunes shows and other subscription/downloadable content as well as your own videos for entertainment on the road.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Twist joins the small number of convertible Windows 8 tablets to hit the market after the launch of that new operating system at the end of October 2012. The Twist looks like a standard ThinkPad or ThinkPad Edge compact system until you open it up and try out the center swivel hinge that allows you to use the Ultrabook like a laptop, as a tablet or in presentation mode. The 12.5", 350 nit brightness IPS display is sharp and colorful. Better yet, it has 5 points of capacitive multi-touch, though there's no digital pen option as with the ThinkPad X230t.

The ThinkPad Twist is a relatively affordable machine that at first was going to be a part of Lenovo's affordable Edge line, but the company created a new category for the Twist. Like Edge machines, it has that ThinkPad look and Raven black soft touch finish, but the chrome accents and occasional gloss that are telltale Edge touches. Lenovo calls this 3.5 lb. machine an Ultrabook, and though it's a little heavy for that designation, it has all the key elements: third generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 ULV CPUs, Intel HD 4000 graphics, 4 or 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM and your choice of a spinning hard drive with a small caching SSD or a full 128 gig SSD drive.

As you'd expect from a ThinkPad, the Twist is a sturdy and understated laptop with a superb keyboard and very good Synaptics trackpad plus Trackpoint. Alas, the keyboard isn't backlit, but that's our only qualm. The keyboard, as you'd expect from a ThinkPad, is exceptional with good key travel and tactile feedback. The keys are roomy and the "smile" curve makes them comfortable and distinct from each other.

The build is solid and the unidirectional traditional center swivel hinge that's been used on Windows Tablet PCs for a decade is strong. There is a little bit of wobble when you poke at the screen with a finger, and so far slider designs do the best job of fighting wobble.

Below the soft touch black finish a metal casing keeps the laptop safe from occasional bumps and thumps. As with all ThinkPads, we expect this one to tolerate more abuse than the average plastic notebook. There's no chassis flex and it feels like and is a well made computer. The exterior and keyboard deck are matte but the display surround is a gloss black plastic that cheapens the look a bit. But this is an Edge system, and that means occasional gloss and chrome bits that are flashy and distracting from the overall stately design.

 

The tablet's power button is on the right edge of the display, as is the rotation lock button. There are volume controls on the Fn row of the keyboard and just below the display so you can access them in tablet mode.

Unlike the 1600 x 900 Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, the Twist's display is the more common 1366 x 768 resolution. It looks sharp enough, though it's obviously not as razor sharp as full HD displays like that of the Sony Vaio Duo 11 and Dell XPS 12 convertible Windows 8 Ultrabook-tablets. Still, this is a high quality IPS display with wide viewing angles and good colors, and it's protected with Gorilla Glass. The display is glossy and it does have the usual glare you'd expect from a Gorilla Glass gloss display. The 350 nit display has good brightness and it supports 5 points of capacitive multi-touch but there is no digital pen option (you can use a capacitive stylus, which is less accurate). 

The ThinkPad Twist has two USB 3.0 ports (one on each side), a mini HDMI port (we'd actually prefer micro HDMI or full size since those are both more commonly used), a mini DisplayPort (perfect for driving higher than 1080p monitors), a 3.5mm combo audio jack, an SD card slot and an Ethernet jack. It has the traditional barrel charging connector rather than Lenovo's new compact rectangular port used on some of their skinnier systems. There is currently no fingerprint scanner with TPM option, though the tablet does have a 3G SIM card slot (in the US we currently can't order it with a 3G module however).

Our review unit shipped with the usual 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U ULV Ivy Bridge CPU with Turbo Boost to 2.6GHz, 4 gigs of RAM and a 128 gig SSD. The configuration sold at Staples stores for $899 has the same internals except the drive, which is a 500 gig HDD SATA drive with a 24 gig mSATA SSD caching drive to speed up boot and launch times. If you're a self-upgrader, you can upgrade the drive yourself at a later date by purchasing a SATA 2.5" SSD drive.

If you order from Lenovo's website, you can go with an SSD drive and there's a 1.9GHz dual core Intel Core i7-3517U option with Turbo Boost to 3GHz. RAM is apparently soldered to the motherboard and you can only get 8 gigs if you opt for the Core i7 CPU. All Twist models ship with Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, and that's a capable GPU that can handle moderate gaming, though we wouldn't call an Ultrabook with integrated graphics a gamer's machine. It can handle World of Warcraft and Left4Dead 2 at native resolution at better than 30 fps. The Twist can handle 1080p playback easily as well as productivity apps like MS Office, web browsing, email and social networking as well as Adobe Photoshop and other more demanding applications. While it lacks the pure computational speed of the ThinkPad X230t with full mobile Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs, it offers enough power for the average user and then some (the same is true of most Ultrabooks).

What's the difference between the ThinkPad Twist and the Lenovo ThinkPad x230t? The Twist is approximately $300 less, and it runs on slower ULV CPUs rather than the full mobile CPUs used in the X230t. The X230t is available with either touch or a digital pen (but not both) and has a matte display vs. the glossy Gorilla Glass-clad Twist.

As is the norm for Ultrabooks, the ThinkPad Twist's Lithium Ion Polymer battery is sealed inside. The 42.4Whr battery is ample enough, but as with other Windows 8 touchscreen convertibles and Ultrabooks, runtimes aren't terribly impressive. Our machine gets a boost from the power-frugal 128 gig SSD drive, and we've averaged 4.5 hours on a charge with brightness set to 50%, WiFi on and Bluetooth off. Our test includes a mix of productivity work with MS Office, email set to check at 15 minute intervals, web browsing, social networking and 30 minutes of streaming HD video playback. Users with the standard issue 500 gig HDD have reported 3.5-4 hour runtimes.

The BlackBerry Z10, running BlackBerry 10 is finally here in the US. AT&T is the first carrier to release the Z10, and that's the model we'll review here, with occasional mention of the unlocked US model STL100-3 that we also have in house. In terms of both hardware and software, the AT&T version (also an STL-100-3) is nearly identical to its unlocked US and Canadian cousin, and only a small AT&T logo on the back gives it away. There are just a few carrier apps like AT&T Family Maps and a shortcut to the AT&T account management portal, making for a very clean experience.

This is a pure touch screen phone with no hardware QWERTY keyboard. Instead a capable software keyboard takes care of your text entry needs. The 4.2", 1280 x 768 IPS display is sharp and good looking. The BlackBerry Z10 runs on a 1.5GHz dual core Qualcomm CPU with 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of internal storage. Those are beefy enough specs to make the smartphone's pervasive multi-tasking smooth. The Z10 has a rear 8MP camera that can shoot 1080p video and a front 2MP camera that can shoot 720p video. Wireless is well covered with LTE 4G and HSPA+, dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and NFC. The phone has the mobile hotspot feature and very good reception.

The Z10 is a pleasing looking smartphone that's relatively compact by today's standards. At 4.2", the Z10 feels a lot like the iPhone 5s in terms of size and screen dimensions. I personally prefer larger displays at 4.5" and above for the larger text and more immersive video watching experience, but there's something to be said for a phone that's still small enough to be comfortable to use as a phone. It fits easily enough in a pocket and the textured, rubbery back isn't slippery. The phone is largely make of plastic with an stainless steel inner frame, stainless steel buttons and the front could fool you because it looks so much like metal. The look is strikingly similar to the iPhone 5 and HTC One from the front, but Apple and HTC's offering look much classier from the back and more exciting overall. That said, the BlackBerry Z10 is attractive looking, even if it doesn't wander far from the black slab look (Verizon customers have the option to get a white Z10 along with the usual black model).

We won't complain too much about that plastic back because it allows for a thin phone with a removable rear cover. That means you can swap out the battery and there's an SDXC microSD card slot under the back cover as well as the micro SIM card slot. Removable batteries and storage cards seem to be going the way of the angels, so we're thrilled to see it here. Given BlackBerry's government and business heritage, the ability to swap in a spare battery on the road is a must.

Controls are easy to use, and we like that the center button that's sandwiched between the volume buttons does double duty to bring up voice command. However, we found voice command selection limited and the phone's voice recognition skills mediocre--it doesn't compete with Siri or the very good voice recognition system in Android. Even Windows Phone does better (Windows Phone 8 has excellent recognition skills but a limited set of commands).

The power button up top is just right: easy to press when you want it, but not easy to press accidentally. The smartphone has both micro USB (for charging and data transfer) and a micro HDMI port on the left side. The front camera is offset to the right side just a bit and the rear camera is at the upper right corner beside an LED flash. And no, there's no home button, be it physical or software-based. As you'd expect from a BlackBerry, there's a notification LED on the front above the display.

The smartphone's fresh new OS reminds us strongly of the PlayBook, which in turn reminds of us of webOS. The icons have that signature BlackBerry styling as do menu fonts, but the swipe gestures are pure PlayBook (with a nod to webOS gestures and card metaphor). BlackBerry OS 10 and the PlayBook OS have a lot in common, with a foundation in the very robust and secure QNX operating system. The good news is that the phone is fast and fluid and extremely stable. It doesn't slow down after a day or two and require a reboot as Android sometimes does. We had the web browser quit once in the middle of a page load, but that didn't take down the OS and it only happened once in 10 days of use.

Flow, or gestures are the heart of navigation, and they're optimized for one-handed use. Swipe up to minimize an application and it will then become an "Active Pane" that runs at 1/4 screen size. Some apps will update in Active Pane mode, and it's hard to guess which ones, and you can have up to 8 apps running in this multi-tasking mode. Start a ninth app and the OS will start closing other running apps (or you can tap the little x at the top right corner of an Active Pane to close that app yourself).

Your home screen is a three part experience: a multi-screen palette of icons much as you see on the iPhone and Android, the Active Pane multi-tasking area where you can swipe up and down to view all open apps and the BlackBerry Hub that serves as your one-stop location for text messages, emails, social network status updates, reminders and app update notices. You'll swipe from side to side to access these three main areas. When in an app that has menu options, you'll either see three stacked dots on the bottom right edge of the screen or you can swipe down to see any available options. This isn't consistent from app to app, unfortunately.

We found the keyboard easy to use and text prediction was quick and rational. You can accept a suggested word with a swipe up, which isn't the quickest way to do things in terms of usability, but BlackBerry is clearly in love with swipe gestures. Overall, this is one of the best on-screen keyboards on the market.

The smartphone market is a ruthlessly competitive place, and I must say that BlackBerry was smart to wait until their new OS was super-stable, fast and feature complete. Remember not so long ago Apple and Android came out missing basic features like third party app support (iOS), cut and paste (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) and multi-tasking (iOS and Windows Phone). Fast forward a few years and it isn't even worthwhile to release an OS missing those staples. All the basics are here with BlackBerry OS 10, and we applaud them, even if they don't have a "killer feature" that competing operating systems lack.

I love BlackBerry Hub, I confess. One place to look at and interact with all the things important: what a godsend! From email to texts to software update notices and tweets; it's all there. Twitter messages are threaded, which is wonderful if you have a lot of twitter conversations with strangers as I do. You can reply to social network messages, emails and texts directly from Hub, and in fact there's no dedicated email application. Yes, the phone has email with support for MS Exchange, Exchange Activesync, POP, IMAP (including IMAP idle for a push-like experience), but there's no icon for an email app, let alone the separate email icons BlackBerry 7 provided for each email account.

BlackBerry was synonymous with world class email for years, and now it's one of the platform's less stellar features. I confess, a unified email inbox just doesn't work for me as a business user: I need to jump on my important work emails first, and worry about my personal accounts only when I have time. I don't really want them mixing, and I'm not thrilled at having to tap on the Hub's caret to filter my email account view. Since I'm not a BES 10 user, I can't rely on BlackBerry's nifty BlackBerry Balance feature to separate personal and business emails. That's me, maybe you'll love it. I don't like the unfied iOS inbox either. Folder management has been a bit buggy for me (sometimes emails in folders don't appear) and mass message management shouldn't involve hunting (tap and hold on a message until a side menu appears, then you can choose the "Select More" function- it's the last option).

Gmail is handled as IMAP idle automatically since Google stopped offering Exchange Activesync for free accounts on Feb. 1, 2013. If you pay Google $5/month, you can have your EAS back. The first time I set up my Gmail account, it took about 10 minutes for new messages to come to the Z10, while they arrived instantly on my Samsung Galaxy Note II, Nokia Lumia 920 and iPhone 5s running the Gmail app. IMAP idle should be quicker than that... so I deleted my Gmail accounts and created them again. Second time it worked fine and emails arrived within 15 seconds of my other phones. Quirky. On a positive note, HTML emails look lovely and Exchange works like a charm. You can use the phone with BES 10 (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) but not BIS.

As ever with a new smartphone OS, app selection is slim. Surprisingly, game selection is a strong point in the fledgling BlackBerry World that now also offers video purchase and rentals in partnership with Rovi and a music store. Apps like Netflix are MIA but WhatsApp, Flixster and Adobe Reader are there. The phone ships with a good starter set of apps including Docs to Go for your MS Office needs (view, edit and create MS Word and Excel and view/edit PowerPoint), a pretty calculator designed by The Astonishing Tribe, PIM apps, BBM, Adobe Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Box and DropBox as well as a file manager. There's a YouTube app (actually a shortcut to the mobile YouTube site), weather, a clock with alarms, mediocre voice command and a very good HTML5 web browser with Adobe Flash support and a Reader mode that works more reliably than the iPhone's. BlackBerry Maps offers basic 2D maps with no POIs and 3D driving directions with spoken navigation. BlackBerry Hub brings text messaging, reminders, email and BBM together along with social networking updates. BlackBerry says there are currently 100,000 apps in BlackBerry World, but this is quantity over quality. Many name brand popular apps from iOS and Android aren't here, but there are a lot of junk apps. Too many. We'd love to see BlackBerry raise the bar for apps because these low quality apps don't make a good impression.

As a consolation, it's supposed to be fairly easy for developers to port their Android apps over to BlackBerry 10, so we should see app selection continue to grow quickly. These non-native apps tend to run a bit slower, but for lightweight apps, it's hardly a problem. Creative geeks can grab Android apk app files and self-sign them and send them to their BlackBerry Z10 over USB. If you understand what I just said, this might be for you. If not, it's probably too techy or tedious.

The BlackBerry Z10 is an excellent voice phone with near landline clarity and fullness for incoming and outgoing voice. Volume is average for incoming voice and louder than average for outgoing voice. The speakerphone is very effective (we like it better for speakerphone than multimedia), and it's loud enough for big box stores.

Data speeds on AT&T's LTE network with both the AT&T version and the unlocked model are very good. There's still no good speed test app in BlackBerry World, but subjectively websites loaded quickly and app downloads were speedy. Reception is very good and the phone doesn't suffer death grip reception drops when you wrap your hand around it.

The BlackBerry Z10 has a superb 4.2" 1280 x 768 IPS touch screen with 356ppi pixel density and it's one of the better looking on the market. It's right up there with the iPhone 5 and HTC One X for viewing angles, sharpness and colors. It's also bright enough to be easily viewable in sunlight. Top and bottom bands protect the glass since this isn't Gorilla Glass. Text is very sharp and videos look great, though color saturation isn't quite as high as the iPhone 5 or Nokia Lumia 920. The BlackBerry Z10 supports a fairly wide variety of video formats including MOV, MPEG4, WMV, Xvid and AVI. Throw your movies on a microSD card and the built-in video player will find them and play them. The bottom-firing speaker isn't all that loud but it is clear and doesn't distort. Audio through headphones and stereo Bluetooth is quite good.

I miss a few things from BlackBerry 7, including scheduled on-off times and better control over display brightness. The ambient light sensor never sleeps: there's no way to disable it. That means if you set the phone to max brightness (and you'll probably end up doing just that), you won't get max brightness. Instead you'll get a relatively brighter setting that's still dimmed if the phone is indoors under so-so lighting. Scheduled on-off is gone, but there is an easy to access quiet mode for bedtime that you'll see on the lock screen (swipe down to activate it from the lock screen). This brings up the beloved BlackBerry bedside clock with quick access to alarms, which will work in bedside mode.

The BlackBerry Z10 has a removable 1800 mAh Lithium Ion battery. That's not a huge capacity battery by today's smartphone standards, but it's sufficient to power the phone through a day of moderate use. When the phone first launched in Canada and a few other markets a month ago, battery complaints were common, but BlackBerry has released an OS update with 60 battery tweaks and the AT&T Z10 is running that updated OS. Battery life has been perfectly reasonable for a modern smartphone, though the BlackBerry Z10 doesn't trounce the competition--it merely keeps up. The phone charges fairly quickly: it took 2.4 hours to charge the battery from 10% to 100% and just an hour to charge it from 40% to 100%. If you're a moderate user, you'll charge the Z10 daily, and if you're a light user you'll charge it every other day. If you're a heavy user, you'll need to top up by late afternoon or buy a spare battery.