My contract with my current cel phone provider is up in November. For the past three years, the iPhone 4 has been my constant companion, and I gotta say, I love it.

But it’s getting old and slow, and in the next couple of months, I’m going to upgrade to something new. Chances are high it’ll be the iPhone 5s, but… a lot of my friends are going to android, so I want to see what all the fuss is about, and take some phones for a test-drive before I commit. The focus of these tests will be how the phone performs doing social networking. I barely use my phone to actually make phone calls. Its primary use is social networking and texting.

I recently got my hands on a Blackberry Z10. Now, my first smartphone was a Blackberry, and I want to support them, because they are a Canadian company. One thing they’ve recently done is pared back their offerings. There’s this version, the Z10, which has a virtual keyboard, and then there’s the Q10, which has a physical keyboard.

When I bought my first smartphone, a Blackberry, all those years ago, it was because of the physical keyboard, but now I’m quite used to the virtual one, so that isn’t such a selling point for me anymore.

Here are the things I loved about the Blackberry Z10:

• It’s really light, slim and easy to carry. In fact, it makes my iPhone 4 look clunky in comparison.
• The display is sharp and bright. And large! But the phone still fits in my pocket.
• I could use it right out of the box. Pretty much all social networking apps, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Evernote were already installed, I just had to sign in with my accounts.
• I love the concept of the Blackberry Hub. This is a similar feature to your pull-down notification centre on the iPhone, but it just seems to work better and with less fuss. Basically, all of your notifications for all of your email, texts and social networking come to this one place, so you can quickly scan through them all and see what you need to respond to and what can wait. You can then touch the item you want to respond to, and you are seamlessly taken into that app to create your response.
• It has a cool predictive text feature while typing. Basically, instead of the predictive text coming up on the screen, it comes up on the keyboard, and you just swipe if it’s the right word. It’s pretty scarily accurate, too! Blackberry reads my mind…
• The camera is great: check out some side-by-side comparisons of photos I took on the BB and the iPhone.

The downsides:

• The battery didn’t have enough life to get me through the day. I’d start the day with a freshly-charged battery, and my iPhone would still be going at the end of the day, and the BB would have died.
• Moving from an iPhone to a BB could be a tough transition; I have all my songs and podcasts in iTunes, plus I’d miss Instagram so much!
• Some of the apps were a bit crashy when moving between different ones. Twitter I found particularly so.
• Moving from the Facebook messenger app back to the hub was a challenge. There’s a “back” button that comes up at the bottom, but it seemed to be constantly trumped by the keyboard…

Other than that, I really loved this phone! I think it would absolutely recommend it if you are someone who does a lot of social networking. I’m not the only one–check out this review over at Vancouver Gadgets.

Big thanks to the nice people at Blackberry who let me test-drive this sexy beast!