The BlackBerry World Congress is the kind of event title that would have been very exciting if this was, I don’t know, 2004. BlackBerry parent company Research In Motion has been on a slow and steady decline for a while now and not-very-successfully trying to stage various big comebacks. The latest Congress, happening now in Orlando, features no new devices but today saw the debut of a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. Custom devices running 10 are being given out to developers to encourage them to build stuff for it.
CNET’s Maggie Reardon indicates that the keyboard is a big part of 10:
Like other virtual keyboards, the one offered by BlackBerry 10 is intelligent, and it can learn a user’s patterns so that it knows which words to suggest. But the BlackBerry 10 virtual keyboard goes beyond simply learning which words people use more often. It actually learns how users tap the screen. And it adjusts how it renders certain letters based on someone’s typing patterns.
For example, if someone mistakenly taps the “R” everytime he means to type an “E,” the software shifts its rendering slightly to the right toward the “R” so that “E” is registered instead of the mistaken “R.”
The Congress has also seen the release of Music Gateway. It’s a little fifty dollar accessory that hooks up to audio components and can stream music from your BlackBerry or PlayBook tablet, which would be super cool if anyone bought those things.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
