If This Is BlackBerry’s New OS, It Looks Very Familiar…

Vietnamese site Tinhte claims to have advanced screenshots of BB10, which is expected to launch at the end 

of next month. For the revamped operating system, it looks like RIM has taken pieces from Apple, Google and Microsoft competitors and jammed them together.

First, a disclaimer: These are supposed leaks that we can’t verify, but based on what we’ve seen previously from an official video, these are totally believable screenshots of the forthcoming OS.

The overall UI is pretty conservative, and the homescreen and pull-down menus look like a direct descendent of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin for Android. The icon design is horrendous. What’s up with the shadowing behind the icons, and why is the LinkedIn icon bigger than the others? Hopefully, that dimension within the icon will be standardised for the final version. The skeuomorphic page flapping in the wind on the calendar icon doesn’t bode well either. Also, please tell us which enterprise Blackberry client is going to enjoy an app called story maker.

Here we see what appears to be some kind of voice search application. A Siri for Blackberry perhaps. The boxy design of those dialogues sure reminds us of Windows Phone, but that square microphone button doesn’t quite do it for us. Maybe RIM is just trying to avoid getting sued by Apple over the design of the Siri mic button.

Blackberry Hub is the central messaging system for BB10. Hard to judge from what we see here. But then, it’s a little worrisome that we can’t tell what’s going on from a graphical UI standpoint by glancing at it either. It all looks very redundant.

Twitter and Facebook look more or less the way they do on other mobile operating systems.

We’ll see what RIM shows us when BB10 is officially launched on January 30
.