The company formerly known as Research In Motion says its product line is “re-designed, re-engineered, and re-invented” with the introduction today of the BlackBerry 10 operating system and two devices: the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10. The goal is to make it easy for users to switch between work and personal applications with separate home screens. The Z10 has a 4.2-inch, high-definition touchscreen, while the Q10 has a smaller screen and a physical keyboard. They’ll come with 16 GB of memory, and a slot for a memory card. The back opens, so users can replace the battery. The company says they offer simple ways to launch video chats with multiple applications open. A Screen Share application makes it possible for another user to take charge of the screen. Users can focus the camera via touch screen commands, and manipulate images with a built-in picture editor. The Story Maker application can create videos with music and images edited in. The company says it has more than 1,000 BlackBerry 10 apps including Skype, Amazon Kindle, SAP, Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and TuneIn. All of the major studios and music companies will offer content on BlackBerry World. The phones are expected to be available in the U.S. by March, and while carriers will determine pricing CEO Thorsten Heins said it likely will be $150 with a three-year contract. He says that musician Alicia Keys will serve as BlackBerry’s creative director. “I broke with you for something with a little more bling,” she said at the rollout event. “Now we’re exclusively dating again.” She says she’ll work with app designers and retailers, and people in entertainment and music, to help bridge the gap between a work phone and a play phone.
Heins marked the occasion by changing the company name. “From today on, we are BlackBerry everywhere in the world,” he said. The company stock symbol will be BBRY. But investors seemed underwhelmed by the rollout: The stock, which had been up 4% this morning, fell to -5%. Heins desperately needs businesses and app developers to embrace Blackberry 10. The company’s shares have lost nearly 73% of their value over the last two years as the smartphone pioneer lost market share to Apple’s iPhones and a slew of handsets that run Google’s Android operating system. IHS Senior Principal Analyst Ian Fogg calls 2013 “the last, best hope for RIM’s BlackBerry 10 — along with endangered specimens like Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Nokia’s Lumia and Mozilla’s Firefox — to create a viable third smartphone competitor in the market.”


Too little. Too late.
For what? They have 80 million customers.
Do you?
Instead of coming up with an intelligent response, you attack the commenter personally. I get it. You are a Blackberry Marketing Department Scrub trying to keep your job.
Doesn’t change the fact that REI has significantly lost their marketshare and has been behind the curve as Samsung and Apple have surpassed them in market dominance in the smartphone business. Their inability to keep up with their competitors will cause them to go the way of the Palm. Start looking for a new job.
A great many business users whose companies run the Blackberry system have been waiting for functionality comparable to an iPhone and the Android phones. Corporate IT has been wrestling for years with execs utilizing iPhones and Android phones on Blackberry networks, and I can see the 10 giving them the excuse to say its the 10 or nothing. My company will likely be one of those, which means hundreds of new phones and no more need for IT to try to integrate different systems. Multiply that by a few thousand businesses and you will have maybe not a big hit, but at least a sustainable business.
Sure, I made fun and all when the problems happened … but, then I realized that before that, and really after, I NEVER HAD ANY PROBLEM AT ALL. I welcome the new design … you guys make a quality product!
They need to move a lot of these to make a dent in the market. For reference, Apple sold 47 million phones last quarter alone.
why not just get the iPhone?