Yesterday, January 30, a presentation of RIM took place in New York. At it, the Canadian company announced its own rebranding, and also officially introduced two new devices.
No one really believes in Canadians today. The company did not keep track of the market during its heyday in 2009 and in just a few years turned from one of the leaders into a player standing a step away from the abyss and oblivion. At yesterday’s event, RIM made every effort not to be forgotten and buried ahead of time: one news event followed another.
First, the president and CEO of the company Thorsten Heins announced the renaming of RIM to BlackBerry. Now, roughly speaking, the factory and the operating system have the same name. As Torsten himself put it: “One brand, one promise” (One brand, one promise).
Then he introduced two new devices of the company running on BlackBerry 10. They became the BlackBerry Z10, a kind of analogue of the iPhone 5, and the BlackBerry Q10 – QWERTY-a smartphone with a touch screen.
We have already written about the BlackBerry Z10 more than once. This is a strong middling, similar in characteristics to the flagships of the end of 2012: a gadget with a 4.2-inch screen with a resolution of 1280 by 768 pixels, a 1.5 Mhz dual-core processor, 2 GB of RAM and an 8 MP rear camera (for more details, see the summary table below).
The first reviews of the device are very restrained. Journalists note the good design of the gadget and the system, its great potential and a convenient keyboard (although just here opinions vary from review to review). But at the same time, the gadget has big problems with the battery (but it is removable), there are few decent applications, there are no bright chips, besides, its cost bites without contact.
In Canada, the smartphone will go on sale on February 5. The price with the contract will be about $149. There is no specific information about the BlackBerry Q10 yet. Presumably, the device will appear on the shelves in April of this year.
Martin Mallick, vice president of the BlackBerry business unit, said that the company’s new mobile platform will launch with the number of applications in 70 thousand. No company has ever launched its market with so many programs. However, as noted on The Verge pages, 90% of them are low-quality content.
Mallik promises that a thousand new applications will be added per week. Anyway, BlackBerry World already has games from Rovio, Halfbrick, EA, Disney, Gameloft, and also has Skype, Facebook, Evernote and Twitter. There is a place for movies, music and magazines in BlackBerry World.
Moreover, it turned out that Android application developers can sell their creations on BlackBerry 10 without adapting to the platform. However, emulation works very badly at this stage. The apps look terrible and don’t work the best.
The appointment of singer Alicia Keys to the post of global creative director of BlackBerry was another loud surprise of the event.
As you can see, the presentation of new BlackBerry devices turned out to be much richer and more interesting than similar ones from Apple, Nokia, Google. Another thing is that in a year there may be nothing left of the company. As our colleagues from Cnet note, the company’s new devices are BlackBerry’s last chance. In case of failure, it will be sold. By the way, they are already looking for buyers.