http://www.phonearena.com/news/Live-RIMs-BlackBerry-10-launch-event_id39255

Today is the day for RIM and the whole BlackBerry fan club. After many delays, the Canadian company is finally ready to reveal its next-generation BlackBerry 10 platform, as well as the first devices that will make use of it. There is no Plan B. This is the all-in project for RIM, and there's no room for failure. The once popular manufacturer has managed to lose all of its appeal for most target groups, and has recently started to lose market share to its competitors in areas where it's been traditionally very strong. Whether this trend will continue depends on what we'll see today.

The BlackBerry 10 launch event will not only reveal all important details surrounding the new platform, but will also introduce us to the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones. How many and exactly what these smartphones are going to be like is still unknown, but it's safe to say that we'll see the much-leaked BlackBerry Z10 full touchscreen smartphone, which alone is a quite a good reason for you guys to stick with us, because we're going to cover every single detail about the event and the products that will get announced there.

This is our liveblog dedicated to the BlackBerry 10 launch event! Here you'll be able to follow its progress, as well as get info and pictures directly from the keynote. Stay tuned, guys, the event is scheduled to begin at 10AM ET | 9AM CT | 7AM PT | 3PM GMT!

front page pls Mr Moderator

RIM changes name to BlackBerry, unveils 2 phones - Stock price dropped 10%

this is Rim now blackberry last attempt
I doubt if blackberry 10 will save them
android keep rising with constant updates.
we av to wait and see

bad_ass_nigga: this is Rim now blackberry last attempt
I doubt if blackberry 10 will save them
android keep rising with constant updates.
we av to wait and see

A moronic fanboy you are.
I would refer you to my reply to you on this thread: https://www.nairaland.com/1180222/rim-changes-name-blackberry-unveils

The BlackBerry Z10, the first smartphone to run the brand-spanking-new BlackBerry 10 operating system, finally gives us the first full look at what Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) has bet its future on. And judging by the product itself, it's a smart bet. BlackBerry 10 is a truly cutting-edge platform, capable of mobile-computing feats that Android and iOS can only dream of. However, BB10 is also coming way late to the smartphone game, and it's unclear whether it will ever get the support it needs — from consumers, businesses and developers — to really succeed.
After using the Z10 for the past week, I think it would be a real shame if it didn't, because this phone can, in some surprising ways, be a real joy to use.
The BlackBerry Z10 starts winning you over in the very first second with its novel way of coming out of sleep mode. Instead of pressing one of the (very few) physical buttons, you simply slide your finger up from the bottom of the screen. The phone's lock screen then lights up, but it doesn't stop there: The phone will show you the unlocked screen, too, but only up to the point where your finger is, rather like a curtain rising. Finish sliding up and the phone comes alive in whatever state you left it in; slide back down and it shuts off again. It's useful, clever and addictive — and about as cool as "slide to unlock" could ever get.
The trick also highlights one of the biggest problems the Z10 is going to have in winning over customers: It's unfamiliar. The Z10 has no home button. It consolidates email, messaging and notification into a Hub that demands users think about those functions differently. It has an odd way of switching between apps.
While some of these departures make a lot of sense, they amount to learning curve that anyone picking up the Z10 for the first time may not have the patience for. In a world where most smartphone sales happen in a store, RIM's going to need some serious on-the- ground support for this phone for customers to really see the potential. I can see a lot of people throwing it down in frustration after the first 30 seconds.
The Hardware
At least RIM has designed a phone that people will want to pick up. The Z10 is a good-looking piece of hardware, and I don't think that it's any coincidence that it looks like the iPhone 5 from a distance. It's a little bit larger — 0.35 of an inch thick to the iPhone's 0.30 — but the overall proportions and design are virtually identical, right down to the rounded corners.
This is a completely different phone, of course, and it shows. The Z10 has a rubberized back that feels good in the hand and ensures it doesn't slip, even on a sloped tabletop. The back is removable, letting you swap in a spare battery very quickly and gives quick access to things like the SIM card and microSD memory (none is included, but it accommodates up to 64GB).
There are some nice touches that show off RIM's skill in designing mobile handsets. The top and the bottom of the phone are sloped slightly down toward the edges to make it more comfortable to hold in landscape mode.
The edges themselves have just the right amount of crispness, slightly duller than the iPhone's, and the volume buttons on the side have indented shapes so you can easily identify them by touch. And yes, the traditional BlackBerry blinking red LED is there. Overall, the Z10 a joy to hold.
The screen is an extremely sharp 4.2-inch LCD with a resolution of 1,280 x 768. That takes it well beyond "retina" resolution at 356 pixels per inch, and the result is ultra-crisp text and excellent color on things like photos and games. Of course, beautiful visual experiences are table stakes these days in high-end smartphones, but it's good to see RIM did its homework here.
Those pixels need an engine to drive them, and the Z10's is a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 2GB of RAM. By my reckoning, the chip did a great job powering the phone, keeping up with my finger movements to make the overall experience feel fluid. App crashes were very rare, occurring far less often than they do on iOS or Android (probably about 90% less), but keep in mind BlackBerry 10 has far fewer apps and just one device that developers need to take into account.
Besides being the first BB10, the Z10 is notable for being the first BlackBerry phone to have 4G LTE connectivity. Previously, the PlayBook tablet (which runs software that's similar, but not identical to BB10) was the only RIM device with LTE. Of course, LTE isn't available on every major carrier, but the Z10 will be.
The Power of 10
It's nice that the Z10 is a great piece of hardware, but the BlackBerry 10 experience is where the phone — and RIM's chance for redemption — lives and dies. BlackBerry 10 is a powerful multitasker and organizer, but it takes some getting used to, and it's not for everyone.
The big focus in BlackBerry 10 is the Hub. The Hub represents a rethinking of how mobile phones handle messaging. Instead of switching between different apps to deal with email, text messages and notifications, the Hub puts them all in one place — basically a giant Inbox with all of your messages in a single stream. Even Facebook and Twitter can be mixed in, integrated as system-wide accounts.
It's less chaotic than it sounds. You can choose to display any single account at one time (say, just Gmail or Facebook notifications), and even in the main stream every message has clear icons so you can tell at a glance what it is. Don't want your Twitter @replies mixed in, but still want Hub access to them? You can turn off what appears in the stream while keeping it in the Hub.
The Hub is seemingly ever-present, always running in the background. Calling it up is a simple matter, but it's not immediately obvious. Whatever app you're running, whatever screen you're on, you can navigate back to the Hub with two simple gestures: swipe up from the bottom, then swipe rightward from the left edge. It's not hard — unless no one has shown you how to do it.
Swiping up is actually the gesture for minimizing your app, putting it on a page with all other apps the phone is running at any given time — what RIM calls Active Frames. When minimized, an app remains running, and you can resume exactly as you left it. This kind of multitasking, without taxing battery life, is one of BlackBerry 10's strengths — something iOS struggles with. Although the number of active apps appears to be limited to eight, I was able to call up a game of Angry Birds Star Wars hours after I began it, picking it up at the exact level I was playing.
How the phone responds to gestures is what RIM refers to as the "flow" of BlackBerry 10. Part of the flow is Peek, which is what RIM calls the gesture of sliding your thumb to "peek" behind your app at other content, typically the Hub.
To get a quick look at the Hub, you slide your finger up, then to the right from any screen. The movement tracks your finger precisely, snapping the "peeked" content back when you, well, snap back. It's extremely handy — once you get the hang of it, that is.
Back to the Hub. I found it to be an elegant solution to the issue of "message creep," with having several different apps for email, texting and all the rest. However, like most messaging aggregators, it has its weaknesses. Searching my Gmail account, for example, doesn't work anywhere near as well as on the native iOS app. And I'd appreciate something along the lines of the iPhone's VIP list of top-priority senders.
The Hub provides a quick look at your calendar, visible when I pulled down from the top of my stream. There were my appointments for the next day, but I really started to taste the power of BlackBerry 10 when I launched the Calendar app. Calling up a Mashable staff meeting, the phone showed me the Facebook profiles and contact information of everyone invited. This wasn't in the Gmail invite — the phone was actively going out to my contact lists and accounts to and get any possible info that might be relevant to what I was looking at. Much appreciated.
As much as I appreciated that, the Calendar is hampered by the classic problem of not being able to sync multiple Google calendars. This really has more to do with Google's support than BlackBerry's, but such distinctions are lost on users. Google calendars can be accessed via the web, of course, but then you lose the BB10 magic.
Messaging Machine
One of the biggest things touted in BlackBerry 10 is the touchscreen keyboard, which predicts text in a different way than iOS or Android do. As you type, the OS tries to guess the word you're spelling out, displaying the complete word above the key for the next letter. If it's right, you just flick upward, and the word appears. The feature supposedly gets better the more you use it, and even works in up to three languages at once.
Sound groundbreaking? To me, not really, and it isn't. Perhaps the predictor just takes some practice, but I found that trying to read words above my keys as I typed actually slowed me down rather than making me a more efficient typist. Maybe a legion of BlackBerry 10 texters will emerge in the coming months, but I doubt it. BB10's text predictor is no Swype, where the benefits are much clearer.
BlackBerry 10 does, however, bring with it an updated version of RIM's extremely popular BlackBerry Messenger app. BBM has now been upgraded to include video chat, bringing it up to speed alongside Apple's FaceTime/iMessage experience (voice chats were already in previous versions of BBM). Call quality is decent — better than Skype, but not quite as good as FaceTime. It's horrid when you're on 3G.
BBM video chats have an extra bonus: screen sharing. With just a tap, you can show the person at the other end of the line your phone's screen, letting you quickly share photos, videos, apps — whatever you're looking at really. The imagery is a little jagged, improving slightly if you stay on one screen for a couple of seconds, but it's never as sharp as your native screen.
Huge limitation, though: Video chats are only possible between BB10 devices, limiting them to owners of the Z10 and the coming X10 QWERTY phone. Most video chatting services are incompatible in this way (although progress is being made), but it still sucks.
I also encountered some weirdness in the with email contacts. Trying to email some photos to myself, the phone for some reason associated one of my Facebook contacts — someone I barely ever interact with — with my primary email address. It's the same email I use for Facebook, but putting this guy's name in the recipient field made no sense. At least the email got to me. And if you got it, too, Mike — sorry.
BlackBerry 10 handles copying and pasting similar to Android, just in a slightly more showy way, with similar highlighting and a large "lens" that supposedly helps you zero in on where you want to paste. It's functional, but not nearly as elegant as iOS's roving menus and useful zoom.
One way BlackBerry 10 is not similar to Android is there's no system-wide back button, a decision I applaud. The back button on Android is one of that OS's biggest weaknesses, mainly because it's unclear what it's going to do any given time you tap it. In BB10, apps will display a back button — which typically appears in the same lower-left location — when it's needed, tucking it away when it's not.
Camera Action
Just like most phones today, the Z10 has a pair of cameras: an 8-megapixel model in back and a 2MP one in front, the latter of which is pretty good by today's standards — handy for selfies. The rear camera has an LED flash and does 1080p video recording. The front camera can record in 720p.
Feature-wise, the cameras are relatively bare- bones compared to those found on the iPhone and top Android devices. There's no panorama mode, for instance, and you're also not overloaded with the chinese-menu of shooting modes that are common on Samsung phones. Yes, there are some exposure presets (e.g. "Action" and "Night" and you can toggle the flash and image stabilization, but that's about it.
That's it, until of course you engage the camera's Time Shift mode.
Time Shift is one of BlackBerry 10's "wow" features, using the camera with some clever on-the-fly photo editing to fix annoying "Joe blinked, let's do it again" moments in group pictures.
Here's how it works. First, engage Time Shift mode. Then get your group together, and snap your pic. Joe blink again? Just tap on his face and you can go forward or backward in time on just that face, the phone expertly photoshopping Joe's alert expression on the moment where everybody else looks great. Greta blinked too? You can do the same for her.
Time Shift works well on the BlackBerry Z10, but we've seen similar functionality in the camera of the Samsung Galaxy Note II. RIM's implementation is superior, however, zooming in on the person and calling up a rotating slider to select the exact moment of the person's "best face." It's a little addicting, and everyone I showed the feature loved it.
Less well executed is Storymaker, a BB10 app that can assemble videos and photos from your phone to create a "story" — sort of a video/ slideshow hybrid — of any particular experience. It's a bit like a mobile version of iLife, although it's very compromised. It's not tweakable enough to be a serious editor, and It's not focused enough to encourage the creative engagement of, say, Vine. I'm calling it now: Storymaker will be a flop.
Apps, Apps... Apps?
Yes, the Z10 is a fine piece of mobile hardware, and BlackBerry 10 does some impressive and useful things, despite its steep learning curve. However, no discussion of the platform is complete without talking about apps. And apps are BB10's fatal weakness.
Here in 2013, where Android and iOS are fully mature platforms, with hundreds of thousands of apps, RIM's 80,000 or so are simply insufficient to offer a viable alternative. But it's really not about the raw numbers; it's about getting support for key developers, and offering customers a variety of useful and entertaining experiences.
When I was setting up my Z10, I scowered BlackBerry World (formerly App World) for the apps I use the most often on my iPhone. eBay? Nope. CNN? Forget it. Pocket? Uh-uh. Netflix? Notoriously, no. What about stuff that ties into my gadgets, such as Eye-Fi, Nike+ or Jawbone's UP app? Nada, zip, zilch. Okay, how about productivity-related apps I use for work, including Trello, Campfire and Expensify? Not a one. Even Pulse, a news reader I use religiously and has a simple HTML5 base, isn't there.
Certainly, BlackBerry 10 has some apps. Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are there, though some of those were created by RIM itself, not the networks. Lastpass — a password manager that's essential to my workflow — is there. You can also get Angry Birds and many news apps, such as the CBC.
All that's well and good, but it's not enough. For most people here in 2013, their smartphones have slowly become intertwined with their digital lives, and RIM is pretty much starting from scratch here. It's created a large canvas in BlackBerry 10, but it's largely blank, and that's a tough sell for anyone in the market for a phone today. Do you want a powerful mutitasker, or a phone that can actually run Instagram and Flipboard?
The Balance Factor
The Z10 has an ace in the hole, though, and that's BlackBerry Balance. It used to be that you needed two phones — one for your job and one for personal use. That's evolved into using the same phone for both sides of your life, but the consequence has been an intermixing of email, calls and other content (photos, etc.) from both worlds on the same device.
BlackBerry Balance restores the wall between work and play, but on the same phone. If you end up using a BlackBerry Z10 for work, your company can create a work profile on the phone via BlackBerry Enterprise Service , one that's completely separate from the personal side. Your company has total management of the work profile, but the personal one is out of bounds. RIM has engineered this at the chip level, and it says it's physically impossible to transfer data between the two profiles.
Nonetheless, a Balance-enabled Z10 has just one phone number, and you'll never miss a single notification from either profile. All your email, texts and notifications still get through. You can see the number of calendar events and contacts on the other side, but you can't view them until you unlock it.
With Balance, I can see BlackBerry 10 winning over company CIOs all over again. Finally they'll be able to issue their staff a single phone that they can use for both work and play. There may be a lot of interest in BB10 from business for this reason, which may be the platform's best hope, because I can't see consumers getting interested until the app gap starts to close, and that's not going to happen until RIM can show developers they can make real money creating BB10 apps.
The Final Word
I like a lot of what RIM's done here. The Hub, while not perfect, is a well-thought-out solution to "message creep" on smartphones today. The multitasking is excellent, on par with Palm/HP's dearly departed webOS platform. And that slide-to-unlock trick is hot.
When RIM debuted its PlayBook tablet, it adopted the slogan "amateur hour is over," a clear dig at the iPad and its consumption-based use case. Today, that tagline is better directed at RIM itself. With BlackBerry 10, the company finally casts aside its withered operating system — an amateur mobile experience among the platforms of today — for something that's a leap ahead. RIM's finally gone pro.
However, BlackBerry 10 stumbles, first right out of the gate with its steep learning curve, and second with its anemic app selection that doesn't provide apps (like Vine) that deliver the full mobile experience that today's digital consumers want. Like Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10 now faces the chicken-and-egg problem between developers and consumers: There aren't enough apps to interest consumers, and developers won't create them until there are enough consumers to make money.
For iOS and Android owners, BlackBerry 10 is a tough sell. That's why RIM's battle to reclaim relevance will likely be fought overseas, where smartphone penetration is low. For customers who just want a great email manager and a few powerful organizing tools, the Z10 will provide a great experience. And it can only get better: The potential of BB10 is large enough for some truly excellent apps to grow into.
Will it get the chance? Once you figure out how to use it (which really doesn't take long), the Z10 is a worthy mobile flagship, and it certainly "feels" much better than any BlackBerry device that came before it. That good feeling isn't just superficial, either. It's based on real power, and the ability to do things other mobile OSes can't. But anyone buying RIM first BlackBerry 10 phone must realize: Most of that power has yet to be unlocked.

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jedisco:

A moronic fanboy you are.
I would refer you to my reply to you on this thread: https://www.nairaland.com/1180222/rim-changes-name-blackberry-unveils

; D
dicckhead! it hurts right?
u know what to do if u r not comfortable with my view ....go hug transformer.

bad_ass_nigga:
; D
dicckhead! it hurts right?
u know what to do if u r not comfortable with my view ....go hug transformer.

It hurts yes. But its nothing personal.

Maybe its because I expect a certain level of reasoning from people here so when I see something much lower than the minimum standard being displayed, I get irked out cos that's thesame reasoning that has chased alot of intelligent minds out of this section.

@zazu04
you should have just posted a link to the review rather than copying and pasting the whole review here.
BTW its not too late to do that.