@Kangal and others, Please help me to understand.

It seems like all of the OS's are closed to some degree. Even Jolla and Ubuntu will have some closed aspects, right? Therefore, I don't mind some degree of closed OS, I just don't want something so closed that it gets in its own way and hinders a great device experience. That said, I definitely do like that the Qt devs (and others) have a new cool BB10 UI and hardware platform to exploit.

And, yeah, I agree that companies are always changing their degree of openness and that BlackBerry could change course, but the future is never promised. I bought a Nokia 900, E7, and N9, but Nokia went MS and so I'm through buying Nokias for the time being. My focus is on the nearer term with BlackBerry anyhow.

I'm keeping my N9, but I am also buying a new device, too. The BlackBerry Z10 is my first candidate.

My first worry is that there doesn't seem to be nearly as much openness for the BB10 as there is for the N9, so truly, where is BlackBerry when it comes to being open? Not being able to run apps in the background? That seems a bit extreme to me. For instance, there is a BB10 app that can assign a custom message light signal to a particular contact, but it only works when the app is open as one of your eight active frames. In short, the devs seem to be very limited in what they can do because of API issues.

Other utility apps are also negatively affected. Example: there's no call blocker app for white list and black list management on a businesses phone!

I'm hoping BB10 does get more open, since there is a lot of Qt and other developer talent out there and BlackBerry could use the polish. Developer first movers who have a pretty good app (I'm looking at you Twitter app devs) could play a large role.