WATERLOO, NEW YORK – RIM, newly renamed as BlackBerry, today unveiled their long-awaited BB10 smartphones and demonstrated the completely overhauled user interface with one-finger gesture controls and new business-friendly features at launch events across the world.
BlackBerry will offer two new smartphones running on its BB10 platform, the touch-screen BlackBerry Z10, and the Q10 with a physical keyboard. CEO Thorsten Heins also announced numerous high-profile app partners and was later joined on stage by U.S. musician Alicia Keys, the company’s newly named global creative director.
In Canada the Z10 will be available on February 5th. Pricing will vary by carrier partner, but Telus, Rogers and Bell have confirmed pricing of $149 on a 3-year term or $650 month-to-month. SaskTel also will carry the Z10 beginning Feb. 5, but did not disclose pricing. MTS expects the Z10 to be available to customers in March, 2013, while Videotron confirmed the Z10 will “soon” be available to its customers.
In the UK, the BlackBerry Z10 will be available beginning tomorrow on pay monthly contracts and pre-pay plans from EE, O2, Vodafone, Phones 4u, BT, 3UK and the Carphone Warehouse. In the U.S. market, RIM expects availability with most carriers for the BlackBerry Z10 to be in March, with carriers now starting to announce pre-registration and price plans.
RIM says it expects the first global carriers to launch the BlackBerry Q10 in April and will announce new pricing and availability information as carriers roll-out around the world.
The BlackBerry Z10 has a distinctive textured back surface, features a 4.2-inch, 1280-by-768 resolution display, a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, slots for MicroSD, MicroUSB and MicroHDMI and NFC support.
Both phones feature a new apps manager called the Hub, where with one finger you can preview messages from the app you’re in, choose to reply or reverse the gesture to go back to what you were doing. The phone’s BlackBerry’s BBM messaging service has been revamped and now offers video chat, voice calls, and screen sharing to challenge the iPhone’s iChat/Facetime app.
BlackBerry claims it has 70,000 apps in its store, including Facebook, Skype, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, What's App, and numerous entertainment apps. It still however lacks Instagram, Pandora, Spotify, NPR, Google Maps and Netflix. Investors, at least initially, do not appear to be impressed with the new phones as BlackBerry shares dropped almost 12% in value to close at $13.86 on Wednesday.
A review by PCMag was more upbeat and concluded that the Z10 offers “better video support than Windows Phone 8, better messaging than Android, and more elegant graphics than Apple's iOS.” But battery life, which was never mentioned at the launch, or in released specs, may disappoint. Early reviews indicate that video playback reduces battery life to about 3-and-a-half hours. Cartt.ca is currently reviewing the Z10 and will soon update readers on its first impressions.
