Hasta La Gadget!

We’re right in the thick of RIM’s big BlackBerry 10 announcement in New York, and it’s been nothing if not eventful so far. CEO Thorsten Heins just recently unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 (full review here) a little while ago, and now the topic of conversation has turned to something else: availability. RIM’s first BlackBerry 10-powered device will first appear in the UK and Canada, with sales beginning tomorrow across the pond and Feb. 5 in the Great White North for $149.99 on a 3-year contract.

It’ll arrive in the U.S. in March, with pre-orders starting at the four major carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile today, according to BlackBerry’s Alec Saunders. Pricing in the U.S. has yet to be announced for all carriers, but Verizon has said it will provide the Z10 at $199 on a two-year term for new agreements. And while on stage BlackBerry said that the Z10 will come to the U.K. tomorrow, on through all major UK channels, including EE, Phones4u, CPW, Vodafone, O2, Three UK, and BT.

BlackBerry 10 first started undergoing carrier testing back in October, and by the end of the month Heins announced that more than 50 carriers had begun testing the veteran smartphone maker’s new mobile OS. Heins said that the delay in U.S. launch of the Z10 was due to American carriers taking longer to test new devices than those in other countries. That’s not exactly wonderful for BlackBerry, since the devices will go to market in the U.S. well after the company’s splashy Super Bowl marketing campaign launches.

The Z10 has already made some progress getting its regulatory approval, which could suggest we’ll see it on AT&T’s network first, but that will depend on more factors than just government sign-off.

The FCC has approved a Z10 for AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Verizon, Sprint. No Q10 approved yet. That might tell you who gets what first.

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Rich Brome (@rbrome) January 30, 2013

As for the keyboard-toting Q10, it’ll be available in an “April timeframe,” Heins said at the event. That’s a global expected launch date, and there are no details yet on where it will launch first.

Additional reporting by Darrell Etherington

You’re nobody in the consumer tech world if you don’t have a celebrity “Creative Director” and, with will.i.am and Lady Gaga already occupied, BlackBerry has snatched warbler Alicia Keys. The freshly-announced “Global Creative Director” for the Canadian company, Keys joined CEO Thorsten Heins on-stage at the launch of BlackBerry 10 and promised to “work closely” with developers, retailers, and others to promote the platform.

“I want to further enhance this concept of having your work life and your personal life in one device” Keys said, referring to BlackBerry 10′s combination of both business and consumer functionality. Keys will also be trying to push BlackBerry in the music industry, so expect the OS to feature in RnB and rap music soon.

Of course, being a creative director also means you get to plug your own projects, and Keys is no different. Her side-project of choice is Keep Moving, though the scheme will at least get some BlackBerry 10 devices to use. Neil Gaiman, Roger Rodriguez, and others will be using the OS to produce various creative projects.

For Keys, it’ll be producing music videos in multiple cities as part of her own tour, using the Z10 to make special films to “capture sights, sounds, and fans of every city that I visit.” Whether having her onboard will raise the profile among consumers is questionable, however.

Alicia Keys joins BlackBerry as Global Creative Director is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

BlackBerry has detailed some of the 70,000 apps that will be available on BlackBerry 10 at launch, with high-profile titles like Skype, Angry Birds, and Twitter all ready to go. The fresh new platform – which will debut on the Q10 and Z10 smartphones – will also get Facebook and Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader.

They’ll all arrive in BlackBerry World, the newly named app store which is now the central hub not only for apps but for multimedia. As BlackBerry announced earlier this week, BlackBerry 10 will launch with the support of the eight major movie studios – in the US at least – as well as music content too.

Business users will get SAP and LinkedIn, as well as Cisco WebX, while there’ll also be FourSquare and WhatsApp. Box, The Economist, The Guardian, and more will also join the virtual shelves, along with AccuWeather and United Airlines.

Given BlackBerry 10 also supports repackaged Android apps, and that should give Android developers an easy option for getting their wares into the BlackBerry App World store. More on BlackBerry 10 here.

BlackBerry 10 launches with 70,000 apps: Angry Birds, Skype, more is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

One cannot overstate the importance of this phone. This, the BlackBerry Z10, is the device upon which the fate of BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) hangs. That’s not to say that the company will disappear if the Z10 — and the BlackBerry 10 OS that it contains — is not a mass-market success. But if this phone does not do its job of extending the reach of the ‘Berry OS beyond those die-hard loyalists who have clung on to their Bolds and Torches and Storms, it’s safe to say that BlackBerry is in for some very hard times.

The company hasn’t exactly bet the proverbial farm on this BB10 release, but with massive financial losses tempered only by job cuts, plus an absolutely tectonic shift among the executive leadership and corporate culture architected by CEO and President Thorsten Heins, the phrase “make or break” feels pretty apt. So, then, is this the phone that’s good enough to woo buyers away from the Galaxy S III or the iPhone 5 or any of the other delicious devices on the other platforms? The short answer is that no, as of now it isn’t quite — but of course it’s a lot more complicated than that. Join us as we explore.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, RIM

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For years now, the BlackBerry OS has occupied something of a special state, almost feeling as if it were thrown down into a pit and locked into a bar of carbonite, preserved in stasis for future generations to see. Want to show your kids what using a smartphone was like in 2006? You just needed to find a Bold on display at the local electronics store and let your little ones gaze wide-eyed at a sea of menus and tiny buttons.

BB7, then, was a disappointment for many, feeling like a bare-minimum update to those versions that came before rather than the complete QNX-based retooling we’d all been waiting for. The PlayBook showed us what was possible with a clean-sheet approach to a BlackBerry OS, and we wanted that on a phone. Now, two years after the release of that tablet, here we have it. It’s BlackBerry 10. It’s a wholly new experience, very different even than the PlayBook, and in general it’s quite good. But is it good enough to thrive in a world dominated by iOS and Android? Let’s find out.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, RIM

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