BlackBerry 10 UI Gestures Support Detailed

When made available in the first quarter of the next year, Research In Motion’s upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system is set to arrive on devices with a nice range of enhancements over current flavors of the mobile platform.

To ensure that developers will get familiar with the new design principles in the platform, and that they will have applications ready for the official availability of the OS, RIM has published a PDF guide that underlines some of the main changes in the OS. Of course, the guide can prove to be great reading for future BlackBerry 10 users as well, since it will offer them info on what to expect from the platform when compared to current OS versions. One of the most appealing features of the new operating system release is the inclusion of gestures to operate devices. These are supported from the bezel itself, as swipes in certain directions will trigger different actions on the smartphone. For example, waking up the device can be done through simply swiping up from the bottom of the screen.

Notifications can be accessed in a similar manner, with a single swipe, regardless of the application users are in (a feature that is not present in the Dev Alpha build of BlackBerry 10). To minimize an application on the phone’s screen users will simply need to flick in an upward motion from within the app itself. Users will be able to raise or lower the onscreen keyboard through gestures as well, and the same applies when it comes to viewing the menu or settings of an app. But this is not all, as the support for gestures is present throughout the BlackBerry 10 OS, so that users can easily scroll, select items in a list, access the BlackBerry Hub and do so much more.

You can have a look at what RIM has to say on the matter via the aforementioned PDF file. Additional details can be found on CrackBerry, which has published a series of videos showcasing some of these gestures.

BlackBerry 10
Image credits to RIM

Posted in: Mobile Phone, Preview, Software