BlackBerry in its entirety will be quite pleased this Tuesday morning. That’s because screenshots (courtesy of BGR) of BlackBerry OS 6.0 have emerged, and boy do they look good.
For starters, OS 6.0’s web browser has been massively revamped. Built on WebKit, it’s now multitouch-capable, includes new favoriting, and tab switching (screenshot after the break). The media player (as seen above) has also been heavily modified, now showing what we’ve come to know as “coverflow” (as perfected by Apple).
With regard to features, Research in Motion is including kinetic scrolling (as seen on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad). Multitouch is enabled throughout most of the operating system, and much like Apple’s mobile devices, pinch-to-zoom is more than available.
As far as email on the new operating system goes, is much of what BlackBerry users have been accustomed to right along. A little change here, a little change there. As a matter of fact, it has been described as “cleaner, and a bit more modern” by BGR.
Here’s the rest of the experience, as described by BGR:
Something big for OS 6.0 is the homescreen. While we didn’t see any sort of widget support, it appears RIM has made the homescreen completely customizable with pages. You can have your applications on the main page, then slide left or right to another page with different applications and browse that way. In the homescreen screenshot above, you’ll see a sliding field towards the bottom, and you can slide that up, and reveal the first page of applications, and you can then slide that to show the different groups which correspond to the different homescreen page. Favorites, all, home, etc.
Another big thing for OS 6.0 is modal popups with gestures. If you tap and hold (obviously a touchscreen device is required), you’ll get a 9 icon group centered on the screen which is basically a pretty context menu. For instance, you could be composing an email, and instead of pressing Menu + Send, you could tap and hold on the email, see the popup window, and hit the send icon there. Another use would be when emailing photos or videos from you device, just tap and hold on an item there, see the popup, and then just send the item instead of going through the normal menu options which has gotten convoluted with all the various social services/networks available.
The photos application we saw looks quite a bit like the iPhone’s layout, big tiled square photos that appear in thumbnail view with very small borders, and you can flick that list up or down to navigate. Pictures also appeared on screen instantly, not loading one by one by one until you give up. Once you tap a specific photo, you’ll see the picture slide in from the right, sort of like the current animation now when navigating pictures on the BlackBerry. The usual top and bottom UI bars are still here, but if you tap once, just like the iPhone, that view will hide and you’ll have a fullscreen shot of the picture you’re looking at. There was pinch to zoom on the touch screen device we saw (sorry, we can’t comment on the device), but there was absolutely no fluidity when panning around photos. That’s something a lot of manufacturers miss, but, it’s obviously not the end of the world.
Composing an email looks to be a little bit more straight forward. The UI has nice, clean gradients and a very modern web 2.0-feel. Definitely refreshing. There’s also universal search across the system on here… If you haven’t got the point yet, OS 6.0 looks to be a very clean and arguably sexy UI for the BlackBerry platform, let’s just hope there are some under the hood changes as well. Our source says there are many changes we can’t see.
BlackBerry OS 6.0 is expected to make its debut in June-July.
courtesy of BGR