BlackBerry 10.2 to beat the competition to quick-reply notifications

BlackBerry appears poised to beat just about every smartphone OS out there to adding the type of rich, interactive notifications that users have been demanding for years. Screenshots leaked to the CrackBerry forums reveal that the beta of BlackBerry's upcoming 10.2 update enables users to quickly reply to messages just by tapping on a new notification. 

While it's unclear if all types of apps will be able to take advantage of this, both the built-in messaging and email apps seem to allow it. That's something that's only possible to a limited extent within the latest version of Android, and not possible at all on iOS or Windows Phone, the latter being BlackBerry's main competition for the moment. BlackBerry 10.2's notifications can reportedly be interacted with from the lock screen as well, should a user enable the feature.

The leaked screenshots also reveal support for Wi-Fi direct, which should allow phones running BlackBerry 10.2 to wirelessly connect directly with other supporting devices, as well as an App Manager to more granularly control certain settings on the phone. Through the new manager, users can set default apps and view and limit what data different apps are able to handle. Also present and ready to please the digital hoarders out there: it looks like Evernote is coming to BlackBerry 10.2 as a native app. The app's existence was revealed yesterday by CrackBerry, and its icon appears in the leaked beta screenshots as well. BlackBerry is moving fast to bring its latest OS up to speed with the major mobile players, but there's no word yet on when 10.2 will officially make its way to users

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