BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha hands on review

While there may be no hardware announcements at BlackBerry World this year, RIM officially pulled back the curtain on its previously leaked Dev Alpha handset at BlackBerry World in Orlando.

RIM also made it very clear that the Dev Alpha shouldn't be taken as representative of the first BlackBerry 10 phone. Rather, it's a limited edition device dedicated solely for developers to see what their BB10 apps will look like throughout the development process, until the final BB10 handsets put in an official appearance later on in the year.

We were really hoping to take the next-gen OS for a tour, but once we switched on the Dev Alpha we discovered it wasn't running the new QNX-based BB10 OS. Instead, it was running a modified version of the finger-friendly PlayBook OS 2.0, which goes hand in hand with its large bezel for comfortable gesture support.