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BlackBerry 10 set for January release; phones will hit stores in February

After a lot of speculation regarding the dates, Research in Motion (RIM) has finally come out and confirmed that January 30, 2013 is when the company will officially release the BlackBerry 10 operating system. The same event will see the unveiling of the two smartphones as well, codenamed BlackBerry London and BlackBerry Nevada. We have already seen the two devices in a number of leaks recently. The release of the Blackberry 10 OS has been delayed quite a bit, and this will be the first major hardware and software announcement since the BlackBerry OS 7 smartphone range came out in late 2011.RIM is confident that the phones unveiled on 30th January will be available in stores within the next 30 days, and that includes the network tie-ups in certain markets. The handset codenamed London (also known as the L-series) is a full touchscreen phone, while the Nevada (also known as the N-series) sports a touchscreen plus QWERTY keypad combo, but does away with the optical trackpad considering the fact that the BB10 OS is meant for the touchscreen environment.In related developments, RIM is confident that the government customers in the U.S. will lead the BlackBerry 10 upgrade wave. RIM currently has more than 1 million government customers in the U.S., and about 400,000 customers got the OS 7 upgrades last year. The company’s BB10 devices were recently awarded the FIPS certification, giving them U.S. government security clearance for the collection, storage, transfer, sharing and dissemination of sensitive information.We believe that the BlackBerry 10 operating system and smartphones are the very last chance for RIM to survive in the smartphone business. Based on the kind of performance and multi-tasking capabilities we saw in the PlayBook OS (which is what the BlackBerry 10 is built upon, step by step), we expect a lot of good things from the new OS. Also, the leaked information about the London and Nevada handsets indicate that RIM’s smartphones will now match the rivals spec for spec, something they had not done till now. We are fairly confident that RIM has used the time well to engage developers, because the app ecosystem needs to be in place at the time of the launch itself, rather than promises of more applications later.

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