BlackBerry 10 is still heavily under development and still quite some way from being a finished product, but we've had some hands on time with an early release to get a feel for some of the new features.

Delayed until early 2013, the first BB10 devices should land in January – although the device we used to view the early stages of the operating system was merely just a vessel to deliver the goods and not a final product.

In fact it was the BlackBerry Dev Alpha device which has been handed out in its thousands to BlackBerry developers worldwide, so they can start working away on new apps ready for the launch of BB 10. We checked out an recent version of the device in London, and here's what we thought:

BB10 sees the implementation of a whole new user interface, with RIM doing away with the familiar BlackBerry system we're all used to, in favour of something which resembles the likes of Android and iOS, although with its own unique features.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM has merged homescreens, widgets, app lists and a unified inbox into one slick interface, offering up an easy-to-navigate user experience.

The main homescreen comprises of four widgets, technically mini-applications, which expand to fill the screen when tapped.

Scrolling down and you'll notice that this main display actually holds eight mini apps in total – displayed in order of use, allowing you to jump quickly between your recent applications.

Open up an application which isn't in top spot, or a completely new one from the app list, and when you exit it you'll notice that it now occupies the first, top left spot on the homescreen.

Swiping from left to right will bring you to the app home screen, with 16 apps on the screen at any one time, and you can access more by sliding up and down – the whole thing very similar to Windows Phone's Start Menu UI.

At the bottom of both the homescreen and app list you'll notice a shortcut bar, with quick links to the phone, search and camera applications – allowing you to quickly jump to these regularly used features.

Unfortunately these features had not been implemented on the version of BB10 we were using, so we'll have to wait and see how well they work.

Return to the home screen and then sweep in the opposite direction and you'll be greeted by the unified inbox, which pulls in all your messaging and social network notifications into one easy to access location.

And when we say all, we mean all, as the unified inbox can deal with multiple email accounts, text messages, BBM, call history, third party messaging apps such as Whats App and a whole host of social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Of course, with so many accounts feeding into the handset, the more popular among us will be quickly inundated with notifications from various different channels, however there's an easy way to check where your new messages are coming from, without clogging up the notification bar at the top of the screen.

RIM has developed the "peek" function, which sees the user drag slightly from right to left, which reveals a slender column on the right side of the display, with new message icons and counters for your respective accounts.

The reason for this is so you can quickly see which account has received a new message and jump directly to it if required, whether you're on the homescreen or within another application.

Then there's Cascades, a new navigation system cooked up by RIM especially for BB10, allowing for quick multitasking from within applications.

The example we've seen is in the messaging app - open an email it will display full screen, but drag your finger from left to right and the message will slide with you, revealing the inbox below.

This means if you get a new message in the middle of reading an email, you can check who it's from without having to close the application – similar to the notification bar on Android and also now iOS.

If you were to open an attachment from the email, a PDF document in the case of our demo, pulling to the side to view the cascade will show the app's layers stacked up – a more visual paper trail, if you will.

It's certainly an intuitive feature that we found to work smoothly on the development handset – but it will be interesting to see how this feature is embedded into other applications and if it will have the same pleasing results.

Finally, the last feature which was available for us to play with on this early version of BB 10 was RIM's new full-touchscreen QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry handsets are famous for their physical boards and RIM is keen to bring this typing experience to its BB10 touchscreen smartphones with its own offering.

Visually the keyboard looks similar to the stock Android offering, but each row of keys is separated with a silver line – which is supposed to reflect the metal strips between buttons on the Bold range, such as the Bold 9790 and Bold 9900.

Next word prediction, auto-correct and spell check are all common features on smartphones today and RIM has spent some time developing its own system to offer an efficient typing experience.

It sees next-word suggestions appear above the character the word begins with, and if it's the word you want to use, you just need to swipe up over the word and it will be added to your sentence.

As with many offerings these days, the keyboard will learn your style of writing, meaning it will be able to suggest better words the more you use your phone.

We found the keyboard to be fairly accurate and relatively well spaced, but for those of you used to the physical buttons of a traditional BlackBerry it will take some getting used to.

Although the operating system is still very much in its early stages of development, we must say that we were impressed with how smooth and slick the interface felt under out fingers – seamlessly zipping around without fuss.

BlackBerry assured us that is smooth experience would still be present in the final product, thanks to the clever integration of the HTML 5 system, which optimises the performance of the software. We certainly hope they're right.

Find out more information on BlackBerry 10, including its release date, upcoming devices and the camera function with our BB10: what you need to know article.