RIM shows off Blackberry 10

By Pamela Perez

RIM is looking to rise from its current slump as it announces a host of new features and that carrier testing will begin next month for the incoming Blackberry 10 OS.

By Pamela Perez

RIM is looking to rise from its current slump as it announces a host of new features and that carrier testing will begin next month for the incoming Blackberry 10 OS.

Blackberry has long since been ousted from the top of the smartphone market by Apple and Google. To add insult to injury, it has recently admitted that it had suffered a significant outage across Europe last Friday morning, just as the iPhone 5 was launched in Apple stores around the world.

The company has hopes of staying in the game with the launch of its new OS. RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said that BlackBerry 10 will do everything current OS's do, just better. The new phones, which have been delayed twice, will be on sale at some point early next year. He also announced an update to BlackBerry's developer software.

At the BlackBerry Jam Americas 2012, developers were given the second version of a prototype BlackBerry 10 phone- the Dev Alpha B, which some are speculating might be the coming L-Series handset. It appeared a little different from a prototype given to developers in May but the software looked much more refined and advanced.

In addition to BlackBerry Messenger, it included apps for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare, which were integrated with the phone’s calendar, datebook and e-mail apps.

The design’s interface is called ‘BlackBerry Flow’ and will have an unlock feature in which a user simply moves their finger around the screen.

The main feature though is ‘BlackBerry Peek’, which allows users to see their hub screen from any application without exiting the program by just swiping up from the bottom of the screen.

Lastly, in order to draw a line between professional and personal, BlackBerry Balance allows company phones to have a division between the company's set of rules and the employee's personal use.

Heins said it will be a few months before we see the final version of BB 10 on an actual handset.