There's been a buzz about what would be unveiled at Blackberry World 2012 this week. Will there be new devices? New software? Sort of. Blackberry 10, the new platfom for future devices was unveiled, as well as a prototype device called the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha.
The Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha is just a developer prototype, so it won’t be available for sale, but it does represent what future Blackberry 10 devices, set to release later this year, might look like. The new Blackberry 10 platform is smoother and more predictive than previous versions. During the keynote, Vivek Bhardwai, head of software portfolio for RIM, demonstrated a few features from the new platform.
Users will be able to constantly flow through apps without closing them out by swiping the screen. Doing this allows the apps to run on real time, but it's questionable whether the battery power will be able to back it up.
Typing is one of the things Blackberry is best known for, and their personalized typing feature, as displayed on the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha, is a huge development to an already popular feature. When typing on the touch screen QWERTY keyboard, predictive text will appear that not only predicts the word you are typing, but also what may come next. For example, when typing “this,” “is” will be displayed as a choice for the next word. Inserting symbols, punctuation or numbers will involve swiping, and a swipe of the entire keyboard will delete text.
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins went on to explain features related to taking pictures. He said that taking pictures with the new platform will let you “capture missed moments.” As an example, he showed a photo taken where a person’s eyes were closed. The application went back to a moment during the photo-taking where the eyes were open and replaced it in the original shot.
The positive news coming out for Blackberry 10 might be overshadowed by the negative talk of RIM’s shares dropping 3.8 percent. With a new device lineup waiting in the wings and app submissions increasing by 226 percent this quarter, only time will tell whether this will be enough help RIM bounce back from a less-than-stellar year. Check out the promo video for Blackberry 10 below:
Credit: Christina Ortiz / Discovery
Video: RIM
