RIM Software head details BB10

In an interview with CNET, RIM’s Head of Software portfolio Vivek Bhardwaj detailed some features of the incoming BB10 platform on top of which future BlackBerry smartphones will be built.

Only earlier in the month RIM had showcased some of the capabilities of the new platform and had distributed developers a developer alpha device.
In the interview Mr. Bhardwaj details the home screen of BB10 which he calls four large panes or the cascading UI as RIM called it in the BlackBerry World keynote. He calls these four panes fully functional and live applications, which change as the information gets updated.
Bhardwaj further emphasized the advantages of the gesture based UI in comparison to the standard tap based interface found on Android and iOS as the user never really lifts the finger or leaves the screen.
Talking about the hard task of emulating a plastic keyboard like experience on touch screens he said that RIM’s software will scan your previous history — looking at your emails, IMs, SMSes, Twitter and so on to “understand the type of words you use.” This vocabulary is then fed into its fluency word prediction engine for the best guess at what you are trying to type. The result is a phone that tailors itself to its owner’s hands and lingo.
For this technology he revealed that RIM had worked with TouchType the makers of the popular third party Android keyboard SwiftKey, which offers more or less the same functionality on Android smartphones.
Finally he also talked about the camera technology used in BB10 which basically encourages the user to take a single snap shot in burst mode while the software automatically clicks once the feature is activated, hence allowing the user to edit and pluck out the perfect image from a series of images clicked shown in a timeline