Thorsten Heins took the stage here to give his first keynote as CEO of Research in Motion. "It has been three months since I became the CEO of Research in Motion, and a lot has been said and written about BlackBerry in that time," Heins said, alluding to RIM's declining profile. But he didn't dwell on problems.
"If we want to take this to the next level, to the next decade of mobile computing, we need to take a very separate route… I'm happy to report we're making incredible progress on BlackBerry 10."
In what was likely a preemptive response to criticism for releasing a half-baked PlayBook tablet last year, Heins assured the audience, "We're taking our time to make sure we get this right… We're hitting the milestones we've set out for ourselves in delivering the new BlackBerry 10 platform."
Though much of the new OS hasn't yet been revealed, a few key features were demonstrated. The first, and perhaps most shocking, is the touch-based keyboard. That's right—the first BB10 devices will be touch screen-only. But a lot of care has been put into the software for this keyboard. Buttons are large, and modeling algorithms are in place to learn where you press every key. Additionally, swipe gestures can be used to pull up numbers and symbols, and you can swipe across the keyboard to backspace. It looks very cool, though it may not be enough to satisfy physical keyboard diehards—many of whom are RIM's core audience.
Another key feature of BB10 is the glancing gesture, which allows you to "pull" apps to the side, so they flow into one another. For instance, while running one app, you can simply pull it to the side of the screen to peek behind at what's running behind it, or to open another app. As you open new apps, previous ones will continue to run in real-time in the background, so you can run a number of apps simultaneously, all of which are being updated continuously.
Improvements have also been made to the camera software in BB10. After snapping a photo, for instance, you can touch anywhere on the photo to go back in time. That means if someone's eyes are closed, but the rest of the photo looks great, you can highlight just that area, then step back a few moments in time to when they were open, while leaving the rest of the photo intact.
That's all we saw this morning. There was no info on release dates, actual hardware, or 4G LTE support. But Heins concluded his presentation by assuring that, "there's much more to come."
To help developers get started on the BlackBerry 10 platform, RIM is distributing a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device. This testing unit will provide the developer community with the tools needed to build applications for BB10 devices, so that they are ready when the first BB10-powered devices launch "in the latter part of 2012."
