Today, mobile com­put­ing pio­neer Black­Ber­ry con­tin­ued to defy the many tech pun­dits who have called its demise inevitable by releas­ing a major upgrade to its next gen­er­a­tion smart­phone plat­form. Ver­sion 10.2.1 of Black­Ber­ry 10 began rolling out across the globe this morn­ing, bring­ing new fea­tures and enhance­ments to the ultra-mod­ern oper­at­ing sys­tem that pow­ers the com­pa­ny’s newest line of handsets.

The changel­og is rather long. It runs the gamut from sim­ple, cool refine­ments like a vir­tu­al on/off flash­light but­ton to a com­plete­ly redesigned call screen. Black­Ber­ry has high­light­ed some of the most note­wor­thy improve­ments here.

Impor­tant­ly, for pow­er users, 10.2.1 allows Android appli­ca­tions to be installed and launched direct­ly with­out need­ing to be con­vert­ed to .bar files. Users upgrad­ing from BB10.1, mean­while, will find that the Android run­time is now based on Jel­ly Bean instead of Gin­ger­bread. With 10.2.1, run­ning Android appli­ca­tions is no longer just pos­si­ble, it’s down­right easy. Any Black­Ber­ry 10 user can do it.

If you want an appli­ca­tion that isn’t in Black­Ber­ry World, you can install a sec­ond store­front — like the Ama­zon App­store — and start down­load­ing and run­ning Android appli­ca­tions to your heart’s con­tent. The run­time han­dles most Android apps with­out a prob­lem, mak­ing Black­Ber­ry’s much-dis­cussed “app gap” a nonissue.

Most peo­ple have no idea that the newest Black­Ber­ry hand­sets can run Android apps, or are loaded with cool tech­nolo­gies like the Time Shift cam­era. That’s in part because the new devices have been very poor­ly mar­ket­ed. If most peo­ple were asked to think of a Black­Ber­ry, they’d prob­a­bly visu­al­ize a device with a track­ball or a wheel run­ning slow-to-boot soft­ware orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped in the late 1990s.

But the new hand­sets are very, very different.

The Black­Ber­ry 10 plat­form is based on QNX, which can be found in many cars and in indus­tri­al set­tings. It is a touch and ges­ture based oper­at­ing system.

Some fea­tures and user inter­face ele­ments were inspired by the old­er Black­Ber­ry OS, but in most respects, BB10 is total­ly dif­fer­ent from its pre­de­ces­sor. It is fast, reli­able, and comes with true mul­ti­task­ing support.

To date, Black­Ber­ry has pro­duced four hand­sets that run BB10: the Z10, Q10, Q5, and Z30 (which were intro­duced last year in that order).

The two “Z” phones are all-touch mod­els with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary vir­tu­al key­board that looks like the icon­ic QWERTY key­board found on the Bold series. The Z10 is clos­er in dimen­sions to an iPhone and has a remov­able bat­tery, while the Z30 is clos­er in dimen­sions to a Galaxy Note and has a non­re­mov­able battery.

The Q10 and Q5, mean­while, serve as direct suc­ces­sors to the Bold and Curve mod­els, sport­ing the best phys­i­cal key­boards to be found on a smartphone.

We’ve just about fin­ished migrat­ing over to Black­Ber­ry 10 here at NPI, and we could­n’t be more sat­is­fied with these new hand­sets. Black­Ber­ry has built on its core strengths and leapfrogged the com­pe­ti­tion with BB10. Since last year’s launch, they’ve lis­tened to their users and con­tin­u­al­ly pol­ished the new OS, adding in miss­ing fea­tures, fix­ing bugs, and pol­ish­ing the design.

With the 10.2.1 update, Black­Ber­ry 10 is even more com­pelling, and we join oth­er Black­Ber­ry enthu­si­asts in con­grat­u­lat­ing the com­pa­ny on ship­ping it. We can’t wait to try out the new capa­bil­i­ties. Thanks, BlackBerry!