Much ado about Alpha: RIM CEO Thorsten Heins demos the Dev Alpha developer device that may or may not make it to marketText and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Orlando, FL: Research in Motion's President and CEO Thorsren Heins had his coming out party today and tried to give visitors and developers here in BlackBerry World a feel for where the company was headed. BlackBerry 10, the unified tablet and smartphone OS that was officially launched here was previewed briefly on the new developer Alpha devices which are slate-smartphones that resemble Apple's iPhone 4 but which take all of their materials, design and features from the BlackBerry PlayBook.
Heins seemed enthusiastic about where RIM is headed.
He spoke of the negative media that the Canadian smartphone maker has been receiving and hinted at the deathwatch stories that a number of pundits in the tech press have been running. RIM, said Heins, is in a transition period and is starting to see the fruition of its efforts in developing BlackBerry 10.
BlackBerry 10 is RIM's future, a make or break device and solutions ecosystem that they hope will gain back users in the enterprise as well as consumer market.
Heins even showed off a modified Porsche roadster that was outfitted with BlackBerry 10 and which could interface with RIM's services. No functionality was demoed but the car was left of stage as an example of where BlackBerry 10 can be deployed. Porsche is a partner of RIM's and designed the obnoxiously overpriced BlackBerry P'9981
The Dev Alpha device running Windows 7 through Citrix Receiver
There were no new devices announced during the keynote, even the LTE-enabled PlayBook discussed briefly during a Canadian Breakfast event earlier that day was not mentioned.
The Dev Alpha device did get the crowd's attention and RIM had a handful of units around to show to the press even if all the participating developers got to take home a Dev Alpha device. Here's what we gathered from checking out the Dev Alpha handset. 
- The Dev device has a 4.2-inch screen with 1280 x768 resolution and is running a variant of PlayBook OS 2.0
- It uses a microSIM, is HSPA + and does not offer LTE
- Has a front facing camera as well as a rear camera (no megapixels were announced, but is should be 8MP)
- It is made of the same sturdy and grippy material as the PlayBook, the units at the conference were 16GB in capacity
- It takes about as long as the PlayBook to launch into the OS
- Because of the form factor and placement of camera it looks similar to the iPhone 4S
- It is fast, the PlayBook OS scales nicely on the smaller screen and navigation and multitasking is seamless
- Typing is intuitive, BlackBerry has really stepped up its game with gestures, making it easy for users to type on this device.
- RIM has improved the camera software with something called Timeline Lens which begins taking pictures once the camera is enabled and makes it less likely to miss that one important shot. Users can go back and pick the best shot to use.
What impressed me the most was the seemingly intuitive way the keyboard generates possible options of words based on what you are typing. These floating words can be added into the text simply by swiping them into the upper screen.
The Dev Alpha device was demoed and certain features like multitasking, ease of typing were impressive. The device was used to show off some of the games and applications coming to the market.
BlackBerry users who stuck with the company because of the physical keyboard in their devices will be happy to know that RIM will have BlackBerry 10 devices with QWERTY keyboards as well although it seems multi-touch is really the long term goal for BlackBerry.
As for RIM's other product, the PlayBook, there was some good news on that front as well. PlayBook app growth grew by 240%, which is staggering until one considers that a lot of these new apps are Android apps running in on the PlayBook. Still, RIM was happy that a number of key developers had made their apps available on the small tablet.
Now with the new OS and tools in developers hands, it will be interesting to see how RIM fares once the new devices are released.