The company formerly known as RIM, but now rebranded BlackBerry unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 touchscreen-only device and BlackBerry Q10, which incorporates a physical keyboard, at events held simultaneously in New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Dubai and Johannesburg.
“Today sees a re-invented BlackBerry launching an entirely new mobile experience,” said Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry.
“We are thrilled to be introducing BlackBerry 10 on the new BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones, to deliver a faster, smarter experience that continuously adapts to your needs. Every feature, every gesture and every detail in BlackBerry 10 is designed to keep you moving.”
For corporates the company touted its BlackBerry Balance technology, which separates and secures work applications and data from personal content on BlackBerry devices. This offering is designed to allow companies to lock down their own potentially sensitive data and applications on the remote handset – and delete this material if required – while enabling the user to host personal content and applications on a separate and discrete partition. Further data protection is offered by BlackBerry Safeguard technology
Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum, said: “The Blackberry 10 platform offers a differentiated user experience in today’s crowded and homogenous smartphone market. The Blackberry Z10 and Q10 will stand out from the Android masses and look distinct from Apple’s iPhone. The user experience of Blackberry 10 introduces some nice new features but importantly builds on Blackberry’s UI heritage and therefore will certainly appeal to existing Blackberry users.
“However, the challenge for the company will be to attract new users and those that have already moved to alternative smartphones.”
BlackBerry, at the launch event, stressed the enterprise applications that have been developed for the platform, citing Microsoft Exchange Active Sync and Cisco’s WebEx technology as supported.
BlackBerry said it expects the first global carriers to launch the BlackBerry Q10 in April.
