Troubled RIM now has a bright spot in its future: a release date for the RIM BlackBerry 10 platform.
The company said Monday that it will launch BB10 on Jan. 30 alongside new smartphones that will run the new OS.
That date is earlier than a Jeffries report that claimed that the new OS would launch in March. The future of BlackBerry 10 was thrown into question earlier this year when RIM announced that it would delay its launch of the OS from the fall to early 2013. According to RIM, the delay was due to the “large volume of software code” that needed to be ported to the new platform.
While RIM still ranks among the top smartphone platforms, the company has struggled mightily within the United States, slipping below Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android as the top smartphone platforms. In July, for example, comScore ranked RIM third with a 9.5 percent market share of all U.S. smartphone platforms, in between Apple at 33.4 percent and Microsoft at 3.6 percent .
Still, there’s a lot to like. In our hands on with BlackBerry 10, PCMag’s Damon Poeter found some other nifty features that he liked: the ability to move the green focus box around the field when preparing to take a shot, for example, which seemed like a handy little solution for those times when the automated focus tool gets confused. There’s also a picture mode called Time Shift that basically snaps a bunch of quick pictures of your subject, then generates a radial menu that you can scroll through to find the shot you want—great for capturing that perfect expression on a squirmy subject, like a baby, for example.
As consumers and enthusiasts, one can only hope that RIM rises back to give Apple, Google, and Microsoft a run for its money. In January, we’ll find out if it can.
Copyright © 2010 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc