Hasta La Gadget!

Despite — or rather thanks to — major delays in releasing BlackBerry 10, RIM has let quite a bit slip about its upcoming operating system and related BB10 devices. We’ve had more than a year to absorb leaks, rumors and official information, after all, so it’s no surprise that we have a very good idea of what to expect when Waterloo pulls back the curtain on January 30th. That doesn’t mean things are as plain as day, though; the deluge of blurrycam shots and carrier screens have provided an almost indigestible amount of information about BB10, and we don’t blame you if you can’t keep the story straight. We’re here to parse the madness, though, so read on to find out what to expect at tomorrow’s launch event.

Software

Touch keyboard with predictive input

The first BB10 handset likely won’t sport a physical keyboard, but that doesn’t mean you should expect a subpar typing experience. RIM’s on-screen layout will boast quite a few enhancements to compete with SwiftKey and other similar input options. For instance, the company has demoed predictive typing; press on a letter, and a selection of likely words will hover over the corresponding character (“hey” when you hit H, for example). To pick one of the predicted words, you simply swipe up on it. The keyboard will learn and adapt to your linguistic habits, so you can expect more accurate suggestions over time. In addition to predictive input, the on-screen layout features intuitive gestures such as swiping to the left to delete text and swiping from the lower left to minimize the keyboard. Other gestures include swiping from the bottom to reveal numbers and special characters.

Timeline lens, camera filters

At BlackBerry World 2012, RIM showed us its take on fancy camera software: the “timeline lens,” which uses Scalado’s Rewind technology to capture frames even before you hit the shutter. This means you can cycle back through the shooter’s cache if you miss an image by a second or two.

If The Gadget Masters website, which posted a hands-on video with a “pre-production Z10,” is to be believed, we can also expect photo-editing software courtesy of Scalado, including Instagram-style filters and options such as transform, brightness / white balance adjustment, rotate and aspect ratio customization.

User interface with Peek, flow gestures

One of the most anticipated aspects of BlackBerry 10 is the user interface’s focus on multitasking. The aptly named Peek feature, showcased at BlackBerry Jam last September, lets users view apps running in the background by simply swiping from the left or right. From there, users can either return to their previous task or swipe back to go into previously launched programs. At least in theory, this is meant to provide a more fluid app-switching experience than the task list à la webOS and Android.

Back in May, RIM officially previewed the BB10 home screen, which will include an app grid that displays all currently running programs. From here, swiping to the right will bring up the full launcher, and gesturing to the left will bring you to the unified inbox. Here as well, you can use Peek to view recent notifications and any currently running applications, and then swipe to backtrack to the main hub. Users can also minimize a given window to see new notifications. We also got a hands-on look at the UI in action when we met with RIM Principal Architect Gary Klassen last June — check out our video.

Security features, BYOD

Historically, RIM’s handsets have been almost synonymous with the BYOD (bring your own device) movement, so it’s no surprise that BB10 devices will come with corporate-minded features on board. First off, the OS has FIP 140-2 certification, meaning it meets the security and encryption requirements of government agencies and enterprises.

BB10 devices will also have BlackBerry Balance, which partitions RIM’s phones into separate work and personal profiles. To toggle between these two modes, you simply pull down from the app icon grid. You’ll see different applications listed depending on which profile you’re in, and you can run applications simultaneously in both profiles. For instance, you can have the browser open on the corporate side, and it will adhere to your IT desk’s policies, and on the personal side it will run without these restrictions.

Apps

One of many tidbits we’ve gleaned from the leaked BB10 training manual is that RIM is promising some 70,000 QNX apps in the BlackBerry World store at launch. And indeed, Waterloo has been aggressively courting developers, offering a $10,000 guarantee for approved apps that make less than 10k in the first year. The company also held “Portathon” events to drum up app submissions with a cash incentive. One such contest netted 15,000 entries in less than 38 hours.

In addition to seeking new applications, RIM has invested time and money into securing the top names for its platform. Rest assured that a native Facebook app will be on board at launch, as will Foursquare. We also have good reason to believe that Google Talk and Twitter will be integrated into the unified inbox.

Clearly, we won’t be walking blindly into the BlackBerry 10 launch event, as both RIM itself and countless leaks have furnished us with plenty of details about what devices and software features to expect. Still, nothing is for certain until Waterloo announces it on stage, so you’ll want to tune into our liveblog when the action goes down tomorrow.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, RIM

Comments

Listen to much of the chatter about Research in Motion today and you’ll hear the launch of BlackBerry 10 described in almost apocalyptic terms. All-or-nothing. Live-or-die. Make-or-break. There’s some truth to the extreme language, but BlackBerry 10 is really just the latest in a series of transformational moments for a company that has frequently had to adapt to survive. In that sense, the appreciation for crises and opportunities is almost as natural as breathing for RIM. What’s less certain is whether or not the company in 2013 is as capable of wholesale shifts in strategy as it was for much of its not quite 30-year history. Read on to see why reform is possible, but won’t be quite so easy.

For its first two decades, RIM often showed the traits of a scrappy startup. It had nothing to lose and was willing to turn its business model on a dime to stay afloat. More importantly, it also had a simple, overriding determination to spread wireless data to the masses, no matter how that would come to pass. That gave it a leg up over contemporary technology stalwarts like Apple, Microsoft and Palm, all of whom were at least slightly behind RIM in seeing the value of truly instant mobile communication. CEO Mike Lazaridis (and eventual co-CEO Jim Balsillie) would see a void in the market, whether it was two-way paging or mobile email, and switch strategies to fill it.

The company spent more time trying to justify its existing smartphone philosophy and less time getting ahead of trends.

As the 2000s wore on, however, RIM slowed down. Much of the decade revolved around entrenching what we know as the core BlackBerry business model, where messaging-focused smartphones ship to large-scale customers. The company acknowledged the consumer world as early as 2003, but its approach was increasingly reactionary. We wouldn’t have had the BlackBerry Storm without the iPhone popularizing touchscreens first, for example. The company spent more time trying to justify its existing smartphone philosophy and less time getting ahead of trends, even as it lost its market share advantage and started working on BlackBerry 10. Some saw the eventual departures of Lazaridis, Balsillie and a slew of executives as necessary to undo an institutionalized resistance to change.

The launch of BlackBerry 10 isn’t just the test of a software redesign, then. It’s gauging whether or not a leaner RIM is once again nimble enough to stay relevant. We haven’t quite returned to the company’s early days, but its current position is an uncannily familiar one where RIM has to bet the farm on a new project. The difference? RIM isn’t entering an untapped wireless market this time. While it’s on better footing than a defunct mobile veteran like Palm, there’s not much room for a second chance. Follow along with our timeline to see just how RIM’s opportunities opened up, closed shut and maybe (just maybe) opened up again with a new OS.

1984 – 1994

Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin officially founded Research in Motion on March 7th, 1984 with a desire to commercialize Budgie, a system that wirelessly displayed information on a TV screen. It generated enough business to let RIM take on side projects, including a film barcode reader, but the real kick start was the arrival of one of the earliest wireless data networks, Mobitex. Software deals to support it led to the 1993 launch of RIMGate, the precursor to BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and wireless point-of-sale terminals in 1994. This early period also saw the introduction of Jim Balsillie, who met Lazaridis while trying to negotiate a purchase of RIM in 1992 and quickly became the future BlackBerry maker’s VP of Finance. Few other companies were as actively interested in mobile data at the time: apart from Mobitex creator Ericsson, the most conspicuous participant was IBM, whose smartphone-like Simon Personal Communicator went on sale briefly in 1994 and still depended on a 2,400-baud modem for data.

1995 – 2001

RIM’s experience developing code for Mobitex led it to building hardware, starting with a PCMCIA modem in 1995. The company’s first mobile messaging device, the RIM 900 Inter@ctive Pager, came a year later, followed by the smaller and more successful RIM 950 in 1998. The first hardware that resembled a BlackBerry as we know it today was the not-very-elegantly named RIM 957 from April 2000, but it only offered data and wasn’t joined at the hip with the BlackBerry name. While the BlackBerry email service launched in January 1999 and went mobile with the 957, it would be three years before there was a proper BlackBerry phone. More smartphone-like technology was emerging in the form of devices like the Nokia 9000 series in 1996, Ericsson’s Symbian-based R380 in 2000 and the Palm OS-running Kyocera 6035 in 2001, although few would say they cracked the market wide open when the PDA side was either crude or entirely separate. This was Palm’s heyday, and many were still satisfied with a cellphone in one hand and a PDA in the other.

2002 – 2005

The BlackBerry era started in earnest in March 2002, when RIM unveiled the BlackBerry 5810. It was the first handheld from RIM to carry GSM and GPRS, although phone service was almost incidental when owners had to plug in a headset just to make calls. The situation got better when the 6710 and beyond had audio hardware built-in. Color came with the 7200 and 7700 series in 2003, but the real breakthroughs were the 6200 series from that year and the 7100 in 2004, which were explicitly targeted at “prosumers” who wanted a BlackBerry for personal use. In 2005, the 8700 series took the 7100’s sleeker aesthetic to the high-end; for many, it was the first modern BlackBerry, where a polished design, phone features and a full keyboard were all in one device. Not that RIM could rest on its laurels. Nokia, Palm and others had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into smartphones, and Microsoft’s launches of Pocket PC 2002 and Windows Mobile provided a start for smartphone makers that would eventually play important roles, like HTC.

2006 – 2007

It’s at the middle of last decade that RIM simultaneously reached its creative zenith and sowed the seeds of its decline. The BlackBerry Pearl of 2006 was the company’s first phone built expressly for the regular public, and had such radical concepts (for RIM) as a camera and dedicated media playback. Both the Pearl and the QWERTY-equipped Curve of 2007 would be key to an explosion in sales over the next few years. However, it’s also in 2007 that Apple launched the iPhone and began the public’s love affair with touchscreens in their mobile devices. RIM’s response, even into 2010, was to downplay the threat; it argued that customers needed hardware keyboards. It was difficult to know then just how dangerous the attitude would be when others were similarly dismissive — see Steve Ballmer’s jab that the iPhone was too expensive to succeed, for example — but it’s clear in hindsight that RIM had put the blinders on at the very moment its eyes needed to be wide open.

2008 – 2009

Despite its love of physical keys, RIM’s solution to newfound competition was to hedge its bets. Traditionalists got the upscale Bold 9000 line in May 2008; would-be Android and iPhone converts got the BlackBerry Storm in November of that year. BlackBerry App World also countered the Android Market and the App Store several months after the fact, in 2009. The platform reached a peak of 20.8 percent market share in the third quarter that same year, according to Gartner, but the bloom was already starting to come off the rose. The iPhone 3GS helped Apple outsell RIM for the first time, as Steve Jobs noted that fall. Hype for the Storm quickly fizzled out, and Verizon’s edition of the Storm 2 launched the same day in October 2009 as the more heavily promoted (and ultimately more successful) Motorola Droid. RIM could mostly take comfort in knowing that the competing Nokia N97 and Palm Pre also did little to halt the declines of their respective creators.

2010

RIM was aware that the BlackBerry needed more than just a small tuneup, and spent much of 2010 laying the groundwork for an overhaul. It bought real-time OS developer QNX in April for code that would eventually power BlackBerry Tablet OS and BlackBerry 10. Help building the interface would come in December, through the acquisition of mobile software developer The Astonishing Tribe. We quickly saw early results from the QNX deal when RIM previewed its first-ever tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, in September. Mobile customers weren’t patient enough to wait for a finished product: Apple eventually eclipsed RIM’s market share on a more permanent basis and more and more of the BlackBerry’s loyal enterprise users were among those switching to Android and the iPhone. Most long-serving competitors weren’t faring much better. Palm’s overcommitment to Sprint and its missed opportunity with Verizon led HP to snatch it up. The year was ultimately defined by Android, which Gartner says catapulted from a token 3.9 percent of the smartphone market in 2009 to 22.7 percent for 2010, just behind a rapidly crumbling Symbian.

2011

RIM arguably faced its nadir of public perception in 2011. The PlayBook was rushed to market in April and tanked badly enough to require fire sale pricing for unsold stock — in part because it initially lacked the very messaging features that were supposed to be RIM’s strong suit. BlackBerry 7 devices like the Bold 9900 series gave RIM’s legacy platform a last hurrah, but a sustained, worldwide service outage stained the line’s reputation (and the company’s) in October. Building the $2,000 Porsche Design P’9981 BlackBerry and losing the BBX trademark dispute didn’t exactly endear RIM to the public, either. Management was increasingly seen as the problem, rather than the solution, as disappointing earnings and delays became the order of the day. The firm escaped the ignominy of Palm’s fate, which saw HP reduce webOS to a side project, but was well behind Nokia in the reinvention process, which already had Windows Phone-based devices shipping in late 2011. Apple and Google both took advantage of customer frustration with old stalwarts like Nokia and RIM, to the point where their respective iOS and Android platforms were the only ones gaining significant share. Gartner and other firms crowned Android as the market leader in the spring, and Apple would eventually rise to second place in 2012.

2012

The year of renewal… mostly. Balsillie and Lazaridis were out almost as soon as the year began, replaced by company veteran Thorsten Heins. He spent most of the year getting RIM’s house in order, including thousands of job cuts among the rank and file. Multiple long-serving executives left, and little energy was put into new hardware outside of the already expected 4G PlayBook and budget phones. Most of the company’s fate was now tied up in BlackBerry 10 and its matching devices. Heins ran into flak quickly: BlackBerry 10 was delayed into 2013, and the company started racking up significant losses after years of profit.

2013

RIM is starting 2013 much as it spent most of 2012. It’s in a race to establish BlackBerry 10 as a truly credible third competitor among smartphone platforms before the industry shifts to an Apple / Google duopoly — and before the cash runs dry.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, RIM

Comments

With all the BlackBerry 10 leaks as of late, it seems inevitable that pricing info would get ousted in the lead up to January 30th. Thanks to an anonymous tipster, it appears that the SIM-free version of RIM’s Z10 will cost UKers a cool £480 at Carphone Warehouse (for perspective, a 16GB iPhone 5 would run you just roughly £30 more). The leak comes from what’s said to be a snapshot of the company’s internal database, listing the white variant. The attached BLAZ10WHI model number also syncs up nicely with the previous slip from the retailer. At this rate, not much is going to be left to the imagination when RIM officially unveils its devices come Wednesday — who likes surprises anyway, right?

Update: We’ve updated the post to reflect that the phone was touted to us as “SIM-free,” specifically.

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, RIM

Comments

Crackberry claims to have gotten hold of an official Rogers BB 10 training manual that may or may not add to your anticipation of January 30th. The leak is a Powerpoint slideshow that apparently contains screenshots from an online course for sales people — so there’s been at least one twist in its journey before it reached us, and that’s reason in itself to be a bit cautious. Nevertheless, the document repeats familiar claims from RIM about its new flagship smartphone having “best in class” HTML 5 browser compatibility and performance. It also highlights the promise of 70,000 QNX apps in the re-named BlackBerry World, although we don’t know how many of those are totally new, ported or perhaps cross-compatible with older QNX devices. Finally, a few more specs are detailed in the hope of enticing tech-minded shoppers, with reference to a Snapdragon S4 processor, a 1,800mAh battery and a 356 pixel density that tallies with what we’ve already seen of the 4.2-inch 720p screen. Check out the full pitch at the source links below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, RIM

Comments

Source: MediaFire, CrackBerry

As Sony, Apple and others well know, it’s hard to slip a phone into the marketplace without leaks, considering the many, many points on the supply chain where Mr. Blurrycam can spot it. This time, Rapid Berry allegedly espied promotional photos that look like they came directly from the source, hitting all the Blackberry 10 marketing points like the upcoming Z10 handset in black and white, BBM Video with Screenshare, the new BB keyboard and the so-called Time Shift Camera. While we’ve seen much of this before, these are among the first press-type pics we’ve seen straight from RIM — and tie up the imminent Blackberry 10 future with a pretty bow, if real. Go to the source to see the entire series.

Update: Rapid Berry’s also found a short video showing BBM Video in action at the coverage link below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, RIM

Comments

Via: Phone Arena

Source: Rapid Berry