BlackBerry 10 OS – hands on preview

BlackBerry 10 OS – keyboard

RIM's hardware keyboards are the stuff of portable QWERTY legend, so its onscreen offering has a lot of pressure to live up to. RIM appears to have tackled the touchscreen keyboard challenge head-on and has implemented a host of features to provide one of the best-looking stock touchscreen smartphone keyboards we've seen.

RIM has worked with TouchType (the maestro's behind SwiftKey) to deliver a keyboard that intelligently learns your mannerisms from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as your messages and emails, to accurately predict what you're going to type next.

Although we couldn't test this feature to its full extent today, we were fans of the predicted words appearing on the keyboard itself, which could then be swiped up to use as the next word.

Swiping down cycles through the numbers and symbols, while swiping from right to left deletes the previous word.

Perhaps the most impressive ability is the custom keyboard feature which learns where you hit particular letter keys and invisibly adjusts the 'sweet spot' according to your typing habits. Over time, this will ensure that miss-hit keys are greatly reduced and that you should be able to type near fluently with little to no effort.