The app tray - swipe right to get back to open apps
Vivek Bhardwaj wowed us on stage at BlackBerry World when he provided our first glance of BlackBerry 10 alongside RIM CEO Thorsten Heins. Today it appears that Vivek is following up his on stage demos with some more personal press briefings, as we're seeing some new photos and BlackBerry 10 preview stories pop up on the net (CNet Crave, KnowYourMobile).
For the most part the demos appear to be the same as what we saw at BlackBerry World, showing off the flow experience and new keyboard, but looking at the stories we have gained some additional intelligence as to exactly the homescreen layout will work.
The big question that wasn't addressed at BlackBerry World was the app icon tray. The traditional homescreen view that has the dump of all the application shortcuts installed on the device. At BBWorld we saw the multitasking view, which has the "minimized" version of running apps, but we never saw a way to access the application tray.
But now we know. From the title/glance view, you only need to swipe left to enter the app icon tray, from which you can launch closed apps. Beautiful. You can grab a gander below at a couple more BB10 homescreen photos. I am especially in love with the ability to swipe into the message inbox from within any app with the hooking gesture (swipe up from the bottom right corner to get a notification preview, then over to the left to slide into messages).
Swipe Left from this screen to get the top App Tray (top photo)
Swipe up from the bottom right corner for notifications,
then over to the left to slide into the unified messaging