I got one last week and I love it, still miss a few things from the N9 but the Z10 is very good.

First non nokia phone in 17 years... Mr Elop has a lot to answer for!!!

After playing with the final "leaked" OS on my Dev Alpha B, I have to say that once I had added Twitter, LinkedIn, three email addresses, BBM and visual voice mail, there's a lot of places where the gesture based UI just falls short.

For instance. Go to the Contact app, from there you will see your Twitter/LinkedIn/BBM and (for me) Google sync'd contact information. Tap a username and you can call or text or use BBM video/audio with that person. And yes, there's a back button once you go into a profile. But there's no gestures here. Swipe right and you're going back to the BlackBerry Hub. There are no swipe down or swipe right gestures (to reiterate).

However, go to the phone app. There you will see Contacts, but they're a mixture of LinkedIn (with phone numbers), BBM and (for me again, Google Contacts sync'd up) phone numbers. If you go into a profile there, you cannot text or tweet a person in one touch like the Contacts page. Just make a call. Both look very similar, both have a press and hold to favorite... but you can't text. Not directly.

Both can be swiped away (swipe from bottom or swipe to left) but the controls are similar but dissimilar.

That's just the start. There's swipe down menu on the Phone/Contacts app, but not one on the Contacts app.

In the Mail app, there's a non-gesture based right menu (triple dots on the bottom right), a back button. The triple dots seems to have taken over in previous apps that had a swipe from the right bezel to the center. But they're still not universal in all apps. Not yet.

Now, with the above described, I'm still finding this UI to be the first cousin of Harmattan. In fact, I can say it's a mature version that didn't listen to the mistakes its younger brethren had learned. Flawed, full of menus that either come down, come in from the right or you swipe away to get back to the home - swipe up to go to home, swipe in a semi-circular fashion from bottom to the right to view notifications, or swipe left to go to apps/home.

But I can see why the Z10 jumped to 2gb instead of the 1gb on the Dev Alpha B. When you're using the browser, you will see less than 200mb left of RAM constantly. In fact, if it runs low, the browser will just close. I'm sure there are other memory hog programs, but the browser seems to be the hungriest out of them all.

But with that said, the killer camera face feature - take a pic and you can rewind or fast forward past a blink - is a cool thing to show off the phone. It's been said, and I agree fully, that the Z10 honestly requires decent lighting because low-light pics suck.

The integration isn't as tight as the N9 - Skype isn't out yet and it'll be based on the Gingerbread Android version, not the newer versions - in the areas of Twitter and messages. But the BB Hub is not bad at all.

I can use this phone with one hand - I have larger hands, so if 4.2 inch screens are big for you, stick with the N9.

I do, however miss quite a few things - no SSH, no terminal, no Skype (yet), no Google+ (native on Android). Voice commands are stellar. I've texted, tweeted, noted (and sync'd to Dropbox) and called without touching the phone. That makes me happy.

Flawed but usable. I hope the updates are quick to come. I'm enjoying this so far.

I was wondering how the latest big update to BB10 (which has been described in the US press) has impacted any of the issues raised in Gerbick's post or that existed in the earlier versions of the BB10 OS? This device should be available state-side in a couple of weeks, and any descriptions about its current state of development and user friendliness would be appreciated.

I've gone ahead and acquired a Z10 and thought I'd offer a status report.

After a fair exposure to the Z10, I've been quite impressed from the user's perspective. It has a better than retina display, great call quality (people told me that they noticed the difference), faultless fluidity of UI, top connectivity assets, enough swiping to satisfy an N9 owner, surprisingly good build quality, it's a worthy competitor.

The Z10's tweaking potential is not what the N9's is. Maybe that will change, but right now, they can't even run apps in the background on BB10. So far, I've enabled developer mode on the Z10 in order to side load Netflix (which works very well) and some other Android ports. Hopefully, a future BB10 release will open things up a bit and app capabilities will continue to flourish and more tweaking will be possible. At any rate, current offerings are more than adequate to make the Z10 my daily driver at the moment.

Now, will I stick with the Z10 once the HTC One, iPhone 5, and GS4 become available at T-Mobile? Hard to say, but I wouldn't be surprised if I stick with this one.

T-Mobile gets the Iphone 5 on April 12th.

In regards to BB10 as pretty as it is, its a little too late to the party.

Ha ha ha, I think of the Z10 as the opening line of a long seduction that BlackBerry is trying to use to convince loyal customers to stay and to woo competitor's customers into the fold.

It's not all good news for BlackBerry, but given the reported defection rate that the Z10 is producing by pulling in customers from other platforms, their return to profitability last quarter, and the anticipated Q10 coming soon, they seem to be doing okay for now.

To me, the comparative risk of buying a BlackBerry device is that iOS and Android have zero risk of abandonment or of falling off of the leading lap of the smartphone race. That risk would screw up both the resale value and the continued usefulness of the BlackBerry if something bad happens.

I disagree, BB10 won't be abandoned anytime soon. The issue I have with it is it's locked down so tight I can't mod it or do anything to it. I am stuck to what BB decides what is best for me and I don't like that. BB, Nokia, Apple, Google, or any company has no right to decide what is best for me. As a niche market phone user I will never go to a companies platform as BB because of how it's locked down.

For me, BB10 at least gives Qt developer a viable platform to develop for. BB is sticking to it and improves it fast, and the user base is growing quickly. At this stage the app download stats are easily comparable to Harmattan back in 2011, and still on the rise.

The #z10 is nice but misses some of that polish that I see on the N9. An going to have to wait an update more before getting a final thought on it. The integration works, but as others have said, needs just a little bit more.

Will be messy and neat to see it evolve, and how this community pushes that one along on areas.

This I agree with, but how much was Harmattan pushed when it was released?

BB10 has been pushed really hard and adoption rate is very low, this isn't BB's fault but the fault of consumers for thinking that android/iphone are the only options.